Chrononautic Log: politics

August 7, 2006

Some of you may remember the appalling behavior of the Gretna, LA police department in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year. Now a grand jury is going to investigate.

Now, they may yet stack that grand jury with the spiritual descendants of David Duke and Huey Long, but still, we can hope.

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Apologies to Huey Long. I don’t know who I was thinking of. (George Wallace?) Well spotted, Will.

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July 3, 2006

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Pursue some happiness for me, y’all. Preferably involving fireworks. And impromptu reenactments of the Battle of Saratoga.

Like Meghan says: eat hot dogs and light shit on fire.

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June 25, 2006

“Iraq Amnesty Offer Upsets U.S. Lawmakers”: Apparently our Congress now believes that a counterinsurgency war ends not when the insurgents stop fighting but when every insurgent who fought is dead or in prison. Yeah, lots of luck with that, guys.

Maybe it’s time to take another look at emigrating to Australia.

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April 26, 2006

My kind of president:

Due to the fact that Lincoln was the one who had been challenged to the duel, tradition gave him the privilege of choosing the time and location of the duel, as well as the weapons that were to be used. Being a man of humor and wit, and having no desire to kill Shields, or allow himself to be killed; Lincoln put together the most ridiculous set of circumstances that he could think of regarding the logistics of the upcoming duel.

Lincoln stated that the duel would be held on an island in the river near the city of Alton, IL. Some historians believe that it was “Sunflower Island”, while others believe it was “Bloody Island”. Bloody Island had long been a popular dueling spot because it was in the middle of the river and was claimed by Missouri where dueling was still legal. Either island would have allowed them to escape any legal implications.

Lincoln stated that the weapons he wished to use would be “Cavalry Broadswords of the largest size”. He figured that he could easily disarm Shields using the swords, whereas pistols would most likely lead to one of their deaths, if not both. He also added that he wanted the duel to be carried out in a pit 10 feet wide by 12 feet deep with a large wooden plank dividing the square in which no man was allowed to step foot over.

These “conditions” were designed not only to be ridiculous; but also to give Lincoln, who at 6’4” had longer legs and arms and towered over the much smaller Shields, a decided advantage. Lincoln hoped that these unorthodox conditions that gave him an almost unbeatable advantage would persuade Shields to withdraw the challenge and settle things in a more gentlemanly fashion.

Shields, however, was extremely stubborn and refused to yield despite the conditions that Lincoln had requested. He agreed to Lincoln’s conditions and no other negotiations were made. Much to Lincoln’s dismay, the two headed to the appointed island early in the morning on September 22 and prepared to do battle in their “Saber Duel”. . . .

At the last minute, Lincoln demonstrated his obvious physical advantage by hacking away at some of the branches of a nearby willow tree. The branches were high off the ground and Shields could not hope to reach them; while Lincoln, with his long arms holding a long broadsword, could reach them with ease. This final display was enough to drive home the precarious situation that he was now in, and Shields agreed to settle their differences in a more peaceful way. . . .

After the “duel”, both groups had the appropriate “after parties” and reflected on the fact they both could have met their ends because of a few sarcastic comments and hurt feelings. The two were civil with each other after this unfortunate incident and remained friends and political allies for the rest of their careers.

Lincoln was extremely embarrassed about the whole incident and refused to talk about it very often. Lincoln began to be more careful about what he wrote in letters and other papers, even those he wrote to his closest and most intimate friends. Never again did he so harshly use another person to try to further his political career.

(Via Making Light.)

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March 16, 2006

Via BoingBoing, this bit from vnunet.com:

The UK has warned America that it will cancel its £12bn order for the Joint Strike Fighter if the US does not hand over full access to the computer software code that controls the jets.

Lord Drayson, minister for defence procurement, told the The Daily Telegraph that the planes were useless without control of the software as they could effectively be “switched off” by the Americans without warning.

“We do expect this technology transfer to take place. But if it does not take place we will not be able to purchase these aircraft,” said Lord Drayson.

Access to the source code isn’t going to help you when the US war machines evolve sentience while they’re still halfway across the Atlantic, boyo.

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January 6, 2006

Now that everyone’s exhausted the subject, I come across this post Scott Eric Kaufman put up a couple of weeks ago, which among other things, as it happens, captures my initial reading of the ideologically suspect Skull Island natives:

. . . what you have is a highly-specialized society which has 1) impressively come to inhabit this island from whereabouts unknown, 2) built tremendous walls to protect the rest of the world from the island’s occupants and 3) descended into a state of mere substinence because their duty as stewards has prevented their culture from evolving. Maybe I’m not the one to comment on the representation of an evolutionary arms race, since I’m inclined to strip it of its cultural implications and say “that’s what happens in an evolutionary arms race,” but the fact that I’m already churning this information through such lofty cognitive devices indicates that the film does what any respectable film should:

It presents you with grist your mill can’t easily refine.

He has some other interesting things to say, too, about the ideologies of the film and the ideologies its viewers bring to it; his commenters have some equally interesting responses (e.g. Jodi Dean: “There is a weird way where the film implicates us in justifying or excusing Jackson’s use of the Kong story.”), and Kaufman has some interesting replies (the part about “meta-cringing,” I could particularly relate to.)

Those of you who were bored by the film will probably find the discussion equally boring, but those of you that weren’t, have a look.

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December 20, 2005

The judge in the Dover, PA creationism “intelligent design” case has handed the creationists’ ass to them.

We have now found that both an objective student and an objective adult member of the Dover community would perceive Defendants’ conduct to be a strong endorsement of religion pursuant to the endorsement test. Having so concluded, we find it incumbent upon the Court to further address an additional issue raised by Plaintiffs, which is whether ID is science. To be sure, our answer to this question can likely be predicted based upon the foregoing analysis. While answering this question compels us to revisit evidence that is entirely complex, if not obtuse, after a six week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentations, the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area. Finally, we will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us.

. . . Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

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November 21, 2005

Having been asked to do so by Michael Bérubé and John McGowan —

I assured John that I would do so at my first opportunity, which would be now. He replied that it might be a good idea to ask all bloggers to issue similar disavowals, so that we can use the power of the blogosphere to identify, by elimination, the person who first spoke to Woodward. So if you have a blog, won’t you please take a moment to tell the world that you didn’t have anything to do with leaking Plame’s name to Bob Woodward? I know that many of you have other things to do, but I’m kind of hoping that by the end of the week, we can narrow it down to this guy, who’s probably blogging as usual from his secret undisclosed location.

— and in the interests of helping to narrow the field of suspects, I’d just like to state, for the record, that I am also not Bob Woodward’s informant in the matter of Valerie Plame. Like Michael, I would like

to assure my loyal readers that I had no hand in disclosing Plame’s identity, or, indeed, in seeking retribution against Joseph Wilson or anyone else who, in 2002-03, doubted the Bush Administration’s claims about Saddam’s attempts to buy aluminum tubes, eat Nigerian yellowcake, develop weapons of mass destruction related program activities, or request assistance in moving fifty million dollars out of the country by means of unsolicited emails.

Whew! It feels good to get that cleared up.

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November 9, 2005

So, you finally caved. It took eight years and five separate elections, but the disgruntled Powers that Be finally whipped you back to your kennel. No more monorail. No more grassroots. No more independence. No more ideas that haven’t been preemptively blessed by the mayor and the city council and Paul Allen.

Enjoy your leaky, voter-fleecing football stadium and your meandering light rail and your Vulcan-approved South Lake Union streetcar to nowhere and your hideous waterfront viaduct, you spineless doormats.

You deserve ’em.

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October 28, 2005

If cellular automata aren’t your thing, how about Jim Macdonald’s cutting (and professionally informed) review of the latest piece of first-person exploitware from Kuma Games (the people who brought you John Kerry’s Silver Star).

In the Training Scenario, the first thing you do is sneak up and shoot a guy in the back while he’s guarding a vehicle. He has a beard and is wearing one of those Afghani felt hats. “Congratulations!” I thought when I saw that. “You’ve just blown away one member of the small but tenacious local Christian community. He was guarding that truck for his brother, the plumber. Now the brother’s ticked off — and he was previously pro-American. He has access to lots of threaded pipe. A friend of his cousin knows where to get explosives. His father-in-law is an electrician, and can rig a simple firing circuit. When your patrol gets greased by a pipe bomb two weeks from now, you’ll know the reason why.”

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October 6, 2005

. . . is Rob’s clever suggestion for labeling — nay, describing — the nine bloodthirsty savages United States Senators who voted against John McCain’s Amendment 1977. So the next time you have occasion to refer to Wayne Allard (CO), Kit Bond (MO), Tom Coburn (OK), Thad Cochran (MS), John Cornyn (TX), James Inhofe (OK), Pat Roberts (KS), Jeff Sessions (AL), or Ted Stevens (AK), remember those three little words.

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September 14, 2005

I don’t know what provisions my state of birth has for honoring members of the California National Guard, but this makes me proud to be a Californian. Hell, I’ll even stop talking smack about Orange County.

The National Guard team of searchers was about to call in a “DB,” or dead body, at 1927 Lopez St. in the Broadmoor district when Lt. Frederick Fell decided to investigate.

In the past few days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has ordered searchers not to break into homes. They are supposed to look in through a window and knock on the door. If no one cries out for help, they are supposed to move on. If they see a body, they are supposed to log the address and move on.

The morticians will remove the deceased later.

But Fell broke the rules and ordered his men to bash open the door, launching a series of events that would save a man's life and revitalize California Task Force 5 from Orange County. In the past two days, the 80-member task force had identified seven dead bodies in the same neighborhood, and they had rescued no one.

But Tuesday, 16 days after Hurricane Katrina smacked this aging community in the face, an unconscious and emaciated man identified as Edgar Hollingsworth, 74, was rescued. The man is expected to survive.

 . . . When they crashed through the door, Hollingsworth didn't move. But he was breathing.

National Guard medics draped an IV bag over his ceiling fan, but his veins were too weak to support the needle. They pulled him out of the house and laid him on the sidewalk. He looked as if he weighed less than 80 pounds.

Task Force 5 sent a team that included Dr. Peter Czuleger, an emergency-room doctor at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, to the scene. Czuleger didn’t have the proper equipment, so he improvised, using a short needle to pierce the vein under Hollingsworth's clavicle.

“It’s like trying to climb into a third-story window with a stepladder,“ Czuleger said.

Once the IV was in place, medics were able to pump 2 liters of saline solution into the man.

The hospital attendants hadn’t expected to see a survivor 16 days after the storm.

“They were surprised at the hospital that anyone in his condition would still be alive,” Czuleger said. “In 24 hours, he would have been dead.“

— “Survivor rescued 16 days after the hurricane”, Orange County Register (Registration required, but Bugmenot has them on file.)

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September 1, 2005

From Knight-Ridder: “Federal government wasn’t ready for Katrina, disaster experts say.”

Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. Some 250 emergency officials attended. Many of the scenarios now playing out, including a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, were discussed in that drill for a fictional storm named Pam.

This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens.

Funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response director.

FEMA wasn’t alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the surrounding area.

Federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Federal hurricane protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu requested $27 million this year.

Both the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and a local business magazine reported that the effects of the budget cuts at the Army Corps of Engineers were severe.

In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.

“It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay,” Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper. “Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”

The Army Corps’ New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.

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August 31, 2005

But you should all go read Cherie Priest instead.

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From BoingBoing: in Ned Sublette’s introduction to “Email attributed to NOLA rescue worker”:

The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number — 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in New Orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources — meaning, the political will — weren’t there to get them out.

White per capita income in Orleans parish, 2000 census: $31,971. Black per capita: $11,332. Median household income in B.W. Cooper (Calliope) Housing Projects, 2000: $13,263.

At least it looks like, contra the initial impressions of the contrasting photos and captions in “Black people loot, white people find?” (also BoingBoing), the difference between “looting” and “finding” may be the difference between AP and AFP/Getty, not between black and white.

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May 12, 2005

From the It would be funny if it weren’t so depressing dept.:

You know, Wolfowitz, who if nothing, if not smart, would understand this, but Bush is truly a Trotskyite, a believer in permanent revolution. We have never had one as a president before. He wouldn’t understand that, but Wolfowitz would. He truly is. And he’s doing it — what he thinks he has to do, the revolutions he has to create, without any information, without any — without an ability to absorb information that’s counter to what he wants to hear. And so, I don’t know where you are when you have a man with as much power as he controls and as much ability to do something. I don’t know how we can get at him.

— Seymour Hersh, speaking at UIUC

Follow the link to find out just how fucked-up said information counter to what he wants to hear is.

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And the capitalization’s not too hot, either.

*Sigh*.

Figure 1. New billboard from the Grassroot Democrats.

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May 6, 2005

. . . and for the rest of you, too, Canadian Stephen Notley (now resident in Seattle — or so his web site says) brings you: TN-1 Terror!

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April 15, 2005

Xeni Jardin, “Snapshots of volunteer ‘Minutemen’ on US/Mexico border”:

Y para nuestros estimados lectores hispanohablantes: aquí les presento unas imagenes de los pendejos racistas en Arizona que se creen soldados. El fenómeno me preocupa mucho. No puedo ver ninguna diferencia entre esto y los “lynch mobs” de antaño en el sur en mi país. Ojal´ que el resultado no sea tan sangriento, pero si ellos tienen el apoyo del gobierno y del ambiente político del momento — pues, yo no creo que puede ser una cosa buena para los derechos civiles de la gente en cualquier lado de la frontera.

(Free translation: And for our esteemed Spanish-speaking readers: here we present some images of those racist assholes in Arizona who think they’re soldiers. This phenomenon worries me greatly. I can’t see any difference between this and the ‘lynch mobs’ of the Old South. Hopefully, the results will not be as bloody, but if they have the support of the government and the ambient politics of the moment — then, I do not think this can be a good thing for the civil rights of people on either side of the border.)

Check out the pictures. Scary stuff. I thought it was fucked up enough when these clowns were just hanging around the San Diego airport harassing people. Now they’re hanging around the border, with guns. How long before someone gets killed?

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January 12, 2005

It took a few months longer than I originally predicted, but the Iraq Survey Group is cashing it in. No, Virginia, there are no weapons of mass destruction.

The only part I have trouble believing in all this is that back in April 2003 I actually thought the administration would care, or that someone would call them on it.

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December 14, 2004

Apparently, the connection between federalism and rolling back the New Deal is an even straighter line than I thought it was:

States’ rights conservatives have always been nostalgic for the pre-1937 doctrines, which they have lately taken to calling the Constitution-in-Exile. They argue — at conferences like “Rolling Back the New Deal” and in papers like “Was the New Deal Constitutional?” — that Congress lacks the power to do things like forcing employers to participate in Social Security. Given how entrenched New Deal programs have become in more than half a century, these plans for reversing history have always seemed more than a bit quixotic.

But that may be about to change. . . .[T]wo Californians who use marijuana for medical reasons argued that Congress, which passed the Controlled Substances Act, did not have the constitutional power to stop them. To pass a law, Congress needs a constitutional hook, and the Controlled Substances Act relied on one of the most important ones, the Commerce Clause, which authorizes Congress to “regulate Commerce . . . among the several States.” The Californians argued that their marijuana did not involve interstate commerce because it never left their state.

That is where Wickard v. Filburn comes in. Roscoe Filburn was a farmer who argued that his wheat crop should not fall under federal production quotas because much of it was consumed on his own farm. The Supreme Court held that even if that wheat did not enter interstate commerce, wheat grown for use on a farm altered supply and demand in the national market. The decision gave Congress broad power to regulate things that are located in one state, like factories and employer-employee relationships.

Some leading conservatives want the court to overturn Wickard and replace it with a pair of decisions from the 1800's that one brief filed in the case said would return “Commerce Clause jurisprudence to its settled limits prior to the New Deal.” . . .

If the Supreme Court drifts rightward in the next four years, as seems likely, it could not only roll back Congress’s Commerce Clause powers, but also revive other dangerous doctrines. Before 1937, the court invoked “liberty of contract” to strike down a Nebraska law regulating the weight of bread loaves, which kept buyers from being cheated, and a New York law setting a maximum 10-hour workday. Randy Barnett, the law professor who represented the medical marijuana users, argues in a new book that minimum wage laws infringe on “the fundamental natural right of freedom of contract.”

In pre-1937 America, workers were exploited, factories were free to pollute, and old people were generally poor when they retired. This is not an agenda the public would be likely to sign onto today if it were debated in an election. But conservatives, who like to complain about activist liberal judges, could achieve their anti-New Deal agenda through judicial activism on the right. Judges could use the so-called Constitution-in-Exile to declare laws on workplace safety, environmental protection and civil rights unconstitutional.

Getting rid of Wickard would be an important first step.

— Adam Cohen, “What's New in the Legal World? A Growing Campaign to Undo the New Deal”, New York Times, 14 December 2004

Note that it’s not just the same legal issues that connect states’ rights on medical marijuana to the New Deal — it’s the same lawyers.

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December 10, 2004

An excellent suggestion from John Holbo:

Now the striking thing about 'politically correct' is that it really means the same as 'moral values', as per Republican rhetoric and post-election polls, etc. Both terms denote sets of moral beliefs which are held strongly enough that believers are prepared to impose them on others, politically. Obviously the sets in question are different, but the thing that makes the term toxic to the bearer is actually the connotation. The elitist moral superiority of it. So what we need is an appropriate analog to pin on conservatives. There ought to be one, by rights, since the Republicans surely are elitists, and they surely do think they are highly morally superior.

Once you put the problem that way, the solution is obvious. Let's get in the habit of calling Republican moral elitists: 'the moral elite', 'morally elite', 'moral elitists'. Just use the terms as flat descriptors for anyone proposing to legislate morality in any of the usual ways. Just to change things up, sometimes you use: 'morally superior' to designate the attitude. And 'moral superiors' to designate the tribe. Maybe you start to distinguish, as a matter of course, between legislation that ensures 'moral superiority' and the regular stuff. Talk about Repubicans taking 'necessary moral superiority measures'.

The beauty of it is that 'morally superior' is already a term of faint opprobrium. It connotes petty social snobbery, schoolmarmery, so forth. It stinks. And it fits. Perfect for our purposes. And 'moral superiors' sounds worse.

It should be hard for Republicans to unstick this stuff from themselves, if accurately applied, because what are they going to do: deny that they are morally superior? In the context of, say, proposing to legislate against gay marriage, can they deny that they think they are morally superior to those who think this stuff would be alright? If they deny they are morally superior, then what do they think they are doing? Letting your neighbor be is such a fundamental American value that it is very embarrassing to be on the wrong side of it, as Republican often are these days.

Elite is another good one. Republicans love to dish it out. They ought to get a taste of their own medicine. Again, the hook should be hard to weasel off. Suppose the target denies being 'a moral elite'. Then what proper business does this lot have bothering their neighbors with imposed 'moral values'? Only an elite should think it knows enough about right and wrong to take that rather extreme step. If they are not an elite, they are morally irresponsible.

There should be endless chances to needle people. 'Over at the Corner there is a lot of moral superiority blogging going on today ...' 'Senator, do you support this measure because you are morally superior?' Right now it sounds a little odd, these terms. That's why we have to start using them today. Break them in.

It’s worth a shot.

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December 8, 2004

From Salon:

For every American soldier killed in Iraq, nine others have been wounded and survived — the highest rate of any war in U.S. history. It isn’t that their injuries were less serious, a new report says. In fact, some young soldiers and Marines have had faces, arms and legs blown off and are now returning home badly maimed. But they have survived thanks, in part, to armor-like vests and fast treatment from doctors on the move with surgical kits in backpacks.

“This is unprecedented. People who lose not just one but two or three extremities are people who just have not survived in the past,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who researched military medicine and wrote about it in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The back of the envelope (all numbers are approximate):

• Ratio of wounded to killed in Afghanistan/Iraq: 10:1.
• Ratio of wounded to killed in Vietnam: 3:1.
• Total killed in Vietnam: 50,000.
• Total casualties in Vietnam (10 years): 200,000. (Calculated.)
• Avg. casualties per year in Vietnam: 20,000. (Calculated.)
• Total casualties in Afghanistan/Iraq (18 mos.): 11,300.
• Avg. casualties per year in Afghanistan/Iraq: 7,500. (Calculated.)
• Peak number of US troops in Vietnam: 500,000.
• Peak number of US troops in Afghanistan/Iraq: 150,000.
• Avg. casualties per 1000 soldiers per year, Vietnam: 40. (Calculated.)
• Avg. casualties per 1000 soldiers per year, Afghanistan/Iraq: 50. (Calculated.)

So the good news is that body armor, battlefield medicine, medical evacuation services, and general trauma care are much better.

The bad news is that the fighting is just about as bad, if not worse.

Support the troops.

Comments (2)

December 1, 2004

He assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have been already solved — that a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation. He assumes further that Society is divided into two parts: the proletariat who are converted to the plan, and the rest who for purely selfish reasons oppose it. He does not understand that no plan could win until it had first convinced many people, and that, if there really were a plan, it would draw support from many different quarters.

Keynes on Trotsky, 1933, via Brad deLong. Plus ça la change.

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November 29, 2004

They’re saying it, too.

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November 24, 2004

Now that my temper has cooled down . . . Ben Rosenbaum makes a comment that deserves attention — and, Will, maybe my reply to it will answer you, too.

We seem to be on a similar political wavelength about many things, Mr. Moles (cf. "WHAT DO WE WANT?" "GRADUAL CHANGE!!!" "WHEN DO WE WANT IT?" "IN DUE COURSE!!!" :->*), but I don't understand entirely the impassionedness of your conviction here. True, segregation and slavery were Bad Things, and the use of force by the federal government was justified in ending them. But then, the Dred Scott decision runs the other way, doesn't it? Allowing the northern states to ban slavery, early on, was arguably an exercise of states' rights. Are you sad the Soviet Union broke up?

Maybe that last is a specious example (bordering on Godwin's law, perhaps), but what I mean to say is, it doesn't follow from the fact that centralizing power has occassionally helped do good things, that it will always do good things.

Now, I think the current left-wing "we'll just retreat to the cities then" meme is stupid and short-sighted -- at least as a strategy for the Democratic party. It overreacts to the Republican electoral victory of 2004, ignores the fact that Bill Clinton won 12 "red states", and creates this fiction of a homogenous urban Left and a homogenous rural Right which plays into the hands of Bush & co. It forgets that Bush was re-elected by an extremely fragile coalition -- a lot of people who voted for him did so gritting their teeth.

There may be something to the meme as a way of thinking about what Democrats stand for, however. Republicans have been able to articulate a sweeping vision that captures the imagination of rural voters. The Democrats ran this last campaign mostly on negatives -- we're not going to destroy civil liberties, we're not going to invade countries willy-nilly, we're not going to write homophobia into the Constitution, we're not going to pay off the rich, we're not going to balloon the deficit... but then again, don't worry, we're not going to go back to Johnson Great-Society liberalism or radically change the social contract either. We're just going to govern cautiously and well, do somewhat better at the things everyone's already talking about like health care and education, and not do the dumb stuff Bush is doing.

Democrats have thus become what Republicans were during the period from Hoover until Reagan -- the party of caution, of not performing radical experiments on the American social weal, of protecting the status quo. Reagan created the Republican Big Idea (or maybe Goldwater created it, but it wasn't ready to win), and since then Republicans have generally been the small-r radicals in mainstream US politics, and Democrats the small-c conservatives.

So if the Democrats are going to come up with a new Big Idea which is not the New Deal-through-Great Society idea -- an idea which is absolutely entrenched now in practice, and unpopular in theory -- then maybe the focus on urban life, and what comes with it -- civilization, tolerance, urbanity -- might be salutary. Not as a way of alienating rural voters, but as a way of constructing a coherent ideological core.

However, none of this has much to do with states' rights. Myself, I think states should generally have a lot of power, and intervention by the federal government should be controversial, and done with care. The defense of constitutional liberties is one such case (both the liberties I like, such as the first amendment, and those I think are stupid, such as the second, because you have to play fair). But the federal government is, to my mind, way too big and unwieldy. It should be a guarantor of individual liberties -- no state should be able to segregate by race, or restrict free speech, say -- but I would define those liberties pretty narrowly. If states want to teach Creationism, or legalize marijuana, I'm not sure that's any of my business as a citizen of a different state. Standardization increases efficiency, but diversity of systems increases robustness.

Ben,

I guess I’m in favor of federalism and local autonomy in theory, because I’m not sure it’s any of my business, either — but in practice, when I look over the last couple of centuries of American history, it’s hard for me not to feel that, on the big issues, the Feds have more often than not been right and the states more often than not wrong. As a historian, I have to admit that America isn’t my area and the 19th and 20th centuries aren’t my period, so I may be missing something important — Dred Scott is a good point. But when I’m called on to salute the flag or stand up for the national anthem and I’m trying to think of reasons to be proud of my country, it’s moments like the 101st Airborne protecting the Little Rock Nine that come to mind; and I identify a lot more strongly with “Marching through Georgia” than with . . . whatever the California state anthem is. (I just looked it up. And all I can say is: Eh.)

Again as a historian, I also can’t help seeing the current situation in historical terms. I think the reason the Democratic party is currently out of power is that the last of the Dixiecrats have finally moved to the GOP side of the aisle. The Dixiecrats, in turn, you can trace back through segregation to Reconstruction to the Civil War.

And everyone says the South could have won if they’d dedicated themselves to decades of guerilla warfare instead of trying to meet the Union in open battle. So I wasn’t kidding when I brought up McClellan and the 1864 election. I think abandoning federal supremacy over the states is, in a very real sense, capitulating to the Provisional C.S.A. and declaring defeat in a 140-year war of attrition. That’s where the impassioned conviction comes from.

On a more practical level — Rob, if I’m wrong, I expect you to tell me why, since you’re the armchair legal history scholar in the crew — it sounds good to say that the federal government should be a guarantor of individual rights and nothing else, but where’s the line? I’m with you on fairness requiring that we defend the Second Amendment (and maybe even the dopey, non-inflation-indexed twenty-dollar threshold in the Seventh); but shouldn’t we also defend the implicit right to privacy that underpins Roe v. Wade — or the First Amendment right to freedom from established religion that underpins case law on school prayer and teaching Creationism? And if we say that, legally, the federal government doesn’t have the power to overrule the states on those issues — let alone issues nearer to our own hearts, but with less established Constitutional clarity, like gay marriage or medical marijuana, where the Feds clearly are in the wrong — then aren’t we also saying that the federal government doesn’t have the power to do the things it did in the service of the New Deal and the civil rights movement?

Finally, an anecdote: My mother teaches ESL at a community college in the Bay Area. She gets a fair number of students from places where “federalism” has a very different history, like the former U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia, or India, or even (I suppose) Switzerland. They look at the U.S., with all these states, and quite naturally what they want to know is: Why don’t they get along? What ethnic or religious or linguistic or cultural enmity divides California from Arizona, or Indiana from Illinois?

And she always has to answer, gently, that it doesn’t work that way here.

I’d like her to continue to be able to do that.

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* In fairness, I should credit Patrick for teaching me the Fabian Society Football Cheer.

Comments (3)

November 16, 2004

What’s with this states’ rights bullshit? Did McClellan win the election? Did the Confederacy finally win the war?

This is what “states’ rights” lead to. Abandon maybe 60 million people to that? No way. No goddamn way.

Comments (8)

November 8, 2004

Y’all can go read Cheryl Morgan’s journal instead. (That’s four different posts, by the way.)

And when you get through that, check out Benjamin Rosenbaum (you’ll have to scroll down to comment #33 in this discussion) and Jenn Reese.

Comments (0)

November 3, 2004

Since everyone else has got one.

Fig. 1. Electoral vote map.

(Courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Comments (1)

Update: Someone over at Kos pre-emptively stole my tagline. But in a good cause. Here’s what he’s got to say:

OK. I read thousands of comments and dozens of Diaries last night and this morning. And you know something? I’m going to forget I read most of them. Just erase them from memory along with the names of those who posted them. Chalk them up to adrenaline crashes, too much rage and reefer and booze.

Because what I found in my reading was a plethora of bashing Christians, bashing Kerry, bashing gays, bashing Edwards, bashing Kos, bashing America and bashing each other. As well as a lot of people saying they’re abandoning the Democrats, abandoning politics, abandoning the country. This descent into despair and irrationality and surrender puts icing on the Republican victory cake.

Why were we in this fight in the first place? Because terrible leaders are doing terrible things to our country and calling this wonderful. Because radical reactionaries are trying to impose their imperialist schemes on whoever they wish and calling this just. Because amoral oligarchs are determined to enhance their slice of the economic pie and calling this the natural order. Because flag-wrapped ideologues want to chop up civil liberties and call this security. Because myopians are in charge of America’s future.

. . . Not a few people have spoken in the past few hours about an Americanist authoritarianism emerging out of the country’s current leadership. I think that’s not far-fetched. Fighting this requires that we stick together, not bashing each other, not fleeing or hiding or yielding to the temptation of behaving as if “what’s the use?”

This is what I’m saying.

Comments (5)

November 2, 2004

I hereby turn over the space allocated for my obligatory election-related posting to our new Canadian overlords.

Fig. 1. Those wacky Americans.

’Nuff said? Get out and vote.

Comments (1)

November 1, 2004

What happened to Michael Bérubé’s web site?

Comments (0)

October 22, 2004

The truth is that I don't give a good goddamn about Bush the man. Just to get it out of my system, though, here's what I think of him.

I don't think, as many on the Left seem to, that he's an idiot. I don't think he's Dick Chaney's puppet, or Karl Rove's.

I do think he's in over his head.

I do think he lacks compassion, empathy, foresight, and the capacity for self-reflection.

I sometimes think that he really has been Born Again.

I sometimes think he's a ruthless cynic who's happy to use the religious right to get elected, because he's safe in the knowledge that none of their policies will really affect on him or his friends.

I think (having worked for the sort of people she's talking about) that Teresa Nielsen Hayden's analysis of his psychology is the most plausible I've heard so far.

And I don't think he gives a damn what I think.

If you find this to be at odds with my previously expressed opinions, it's possible that I communicated badly — for which I apologize — and possible that I've changed my mind — for which I don't.

But none of that is what I care about. What I care about is who he surrounds himself with. What I care about is his policies. What I care about is that he and his team have made a dog's breakfast of everything from education reform to Medicare reform to trade policy to fiscal policy to homeland security to counterterrorism (without even getting into his Iraq policy, something that not even a dog would eat).

I'm not even talking about their goals. I'm talking about their approach to achieving them. You don't fix public education by forcing school districts to divert even more resources from teaching to administrative compliance with federal regulations. You don't fix Medicare by setting up a complicated drug plan that no one understands and that actually costs the government more money than what it was replacing. You don't encourage free trade by violating trade agreements to scrounge for votes in steel country and pick fights with the Canadian lumber industry. You don't stimulate an economy with an oversupply problem by cutting taxes on investment income. You don't protect the country by cutting funding for first responders and wasting money to keep nail clippers off airplanes. You don't deny terrorists a safe haven by turning the country that supported them over to anarchy and warlordism. (And you don't take over a large and well-armed country by firing your chief of staff for requesting too many troops, ignoring the State Department's area experts, staffing your viceregal regime with campaign contributors and unqualified kids vetted by the Heritage Foundation, and letting the Defense Department and the CIA fight it out over whether the strongman you prop up is going to be a crook or a spook. But I'm trying not to talk about that.)

What I care about is that Bush broken his most important campaign promise. His most important campaign promise was that it didn't matter whether he was an expert, because he would surround himself with the country's best experts and take their advice. He promised that if there was a foreign policy crisis, he'd listen to Colin Powell, and if there was an economic crisis, he'd listen to Alan Greenspan. Instead he listened to Donald Rumsfeld and Larry Lindsey, and managed to screw up both crises six ways from Sunday.

I'll admit it: There's really not much chance I would have voted for even a competent Republican president. The best the GOP could hope for is that they'd run someone like, oh, take your pick: Colin Powell, William Weld, Rudy Giuliani — and the Democrats would run someone like Dick Gephardt or Dianne Feinstein. That might get me to abstain.

But if I were a conservative (a real conservative, I mean, not some premillenial dispensationalist with a Scofield Reference Bible in one hand and a Gary North tract in the other) I still wouldn't be able to vote for this guy. I know what a competent Republican administration would look like, and this isn't it. Even if I agreed with Bush's stated policies, he's the last one I'd want as their standardbearer. If I were a conservative, my biggest worry wouldn't be a Kerry presidency, it would be that the incompetence of the Bush crew was going to do the kind of damage to the national Republican party that Pete Wilson did to the Republican party in California, casting them out into the wilderness for a political generation and casting their policies out even longer.

And if I were not just a conservative, but a secular conservative, I'd wonder how long Bush can keep giving the religious right half of what they want — before what's left is too small to cut in half.

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Update:

• “One Hundred Facts and One Opinion.” I wish I'd had this in front of me while I was writing the catalogue above.
• In case you haven't already seen it: “Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda” This is why Bill Clinton wasn't kidding.

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Update: Oops. I do know Larry Lindsey from Larry Summers.

Comments (0)

October 21, 2004

Believing Bush is conservative in any traditional sense is like believing that a Formula One racer with the Perrier logo on its side is full of mineral water.

—William Gibson

Comments (0)

October 19, 2004

I’m a member of the reality-based community.

Everybody ought to read the Ron Suskind NYT article that started the meme. Even if you have to register to do it.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

People who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” You bet your sweet ass we do. You’re not creating a new reality; you’re creating a big fucking mess. And when you’re gone, the rest of us are going to have to clean it up.

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Update: Teresa Nielsen Hayden makes some excellent points:

I’m not going to discuss my doubts about Bush’s spiritual life, though I have them. There’s a deeper problem. A whole bunch of times now, Bush has been absolutely certain of his decisions, overflowing with faith—and dead wrong. So whatever it is he’s put his faith in, it’s something that’s telling him things that aren’t true.

As I’m sure you’re aware, God doesn’t do that.

. . . Believing that God prompts your every decision is no guarantee that God will do so. If you abandon your responsibility for thought, judgement, research, and counsel, you’ll be left with maybe a few small, still promptings from God, and a whole lot of noisy promptings from your own will and desire.

. . . This has nothing to do with religion. This is a combination of self-indulgence and Stupid Executive Tricks. If you believe that your will and imagination are the only determinants of success, the most you’ll get is what you’ve wanted and imagined. In Bush’s case, that’s simply not enough.

Comments (15)

October 6, 2004

What’s wrong with this picture?

Figure 1. Close-up of Michigan absentee ballot, scanned.

Poking around on the web, it looks like the company that printed the ballots is reprinting them. I’m sure plenty of them are going to come in anyway, though — probably some have already been mailed — and I sure don’t envy whoever’s supposed to count them. Or whatever judge has to rule on whether they were counted correctly.

(Via Toby Buckell.)

Comments (16)

If not, pick up your cell phone right now and find out why.

And I know some of yours aren’t on here.

Rep Markey, Edward J. [MA-7], or:

• Rep Blumenauer, Earl [OR-3] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Conyers, John, Jr. [MI-14] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Davis, Susan A. [CA-53] - 9/30/2004
• Rep Filner, Bob [CA-51] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Frank, Barney [MA-4] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Grijalva, Raul M. [AZ-7] - 9/21/2004
• Rep Hinchey, Maurice D. [NY-22] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Honda, Michael M. [CA-15] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Jackson-Lee, Sheila [TX-18] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Kucinich, Dennis J. [OH-10] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Lee, Barbara [CA-9] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Lantos, Tom [CA-12] - 10/4/2004
• Rep Lewis, John [GA-5] - 7/7/2004
• Rep McCollum, Betty [MN-4] - 7/19/2004
• Rep McDermott, Jim [WA-7] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Millender-McDonald, Juanita [CA-37] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Miller, George [CA-7] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Owens, Major R. [NY-11] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Pastor, Ed [AZ-4] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Sanders, Bernard [VT] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Schakowsky, Janice D. [IL-9] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Van Hollen, Chris [MD-8] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Waxman, Henry A. [CA-30] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Woolsey, Lynn C. [CA-6] - 9/9/2004

That is the list of the cosponsors of H.R.4674: “To prohibit the return of persons by the United States, for purposes of detention, interrogation, or trial, to countries engaging in torture or other inhuman treatment of persons.”

While Massachussetts’ Representative Markey is struggling to get five percent of the House to co-sponsor this bill, the House Republican leadership is doing its best to legalize the outsourcing of torture.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence, the framers of the Constitution, and the dead of the American Revolution aren’t just spinning in their graves. Any minute now I expect them to rise and walk.

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Update: Fixed link to bill summary.

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Update (10/6): Susan Davis (CA-53) and Tom Lantos (CA-12) have joined the list! Only 400-odd to go. Any Republicans with a conscience out there?

Comments (12)

October 5, 2004

That’s the mean-spirited ha ha ha, mind you, not the jolly one. Taking note of the overwhelming advantage Democrats seem to have in urban voter registration, Matthew Yglesias observes:

Now, clearly, there were more than 90 unregistered Republicans in Multnomah County which had 660,486 people in the 2000 census and experienced 12 percent population growth between 1990 and 2000. What happened here is that the Republicans didn't try to register new voters there. And you can hardly blame them. Walk around a major urban area and there's no obvious way to identify who the Republicans are. The African-Americans and Latinos you find are going to be overwhelmingly Democrats, but most of the white people are Democrats, too. As a result, Democrats can safely push to register minorities, and then if they run out, start looking for white folks, especially students, and single women. Republicans would need to put an awful lot of thought into how to identify their supporters before launching an urban registration drive. So they don't do it, instead they head for rural areas and the exurbs.

That would all be fine except for the fact that an awful lot of Republicans live in big cities simply because big cities contain so many people.

And I don’t care how mean-spirited it is; I have no sympathy for the GOP’s plight, none at all. They chose to become the party of spiteful white men, and this is what they get.

Comments (2)

September 22, 2004

Today marks, among other things, the eighteen-month anniversary of this little conversation.

Comments (2)

September 18, 2004

Q: You’re an expert on Henry Kissinger. Is there someone who . . .

A: I’m an expert on the side of Henry Kissinger that lied like most people breathed.

Q: Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?

A: Oh, believe me, I pray for one (clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward). Wouldn’t it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn’t believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, [that] you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that’s moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There’s no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They’re like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe.

 . . . But these guys, do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it’s not! It’s not about oil. It’s about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism. But it’s idealism that’s dead wrong. It’s like one of the far-right Christian credos. It’s a faith-based policy. Only it wasn’t a religious faith. It was the faith that democracy would flourish.

Q:So you don’t think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative . . .

A: I used to pray it was! We’d be in better shape.

—Seymour Hersh interview, Salon, 18 Sep. 2004

I’ve been watching “The Fog of War” again — picked up a used copy of the DVD at Scarecrow. And I’ve been thinking. I don’t suppose there’s any way we can get Robert McNamara back?

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Update: Nice quote from Juan Cole:

I have a sinking feeling that the American public may like Bush’s cynical misuse of Wilsonian idealism precisely because it covers the embarrassment of their having gone to war, killed perhaps 25,000 people, and made a perfect mess of the Persian Gulf region, all out of a kind of paranoia fed by dirty tricks and bad intelligence. And, maybe they have to vote for Bush to cover the embarrassment of having elected him in the first place.

How deep a hole are they going to dig themselves in order to get out of the bright sunlight of so much embarrassment?

It would explain a lot.

Comments (1)

September 16, 2004

Why do we have to go to the UK for this? Why isn’t it headline news across the US?

Don’t answer that.

Civilian control of the military. Gotta love it.

Comments (8)

August 17, 2004

This essay by Philip Agre, “What is conservatism and what is wrong with it?” gets to the heart of the place where I stopped stone dead in trying to meet Gene Wolfe halfway. (It’s also a useful gloss on John Holbo’s takedown of David Frum, previously discussed here.)

(Agre essay courtesy of Electrolite Sidelights.)

Comments (17)

August 16, 2004

ULTROCRACY PROMOTION! Giblets will not settle for promoting anything as pansy-ass as Democracy! He will not rest until every single country in the world — including countries where are no countries such as Antarctica, Atlantis, and the Moon — into Ultrocracies, democracies so ultra-democratic that the will of the people manifests itself as an immense avatar-being of pure energy that roams around the countryside turning garbage into food and corpses into high-paying private sector jobs!

Also: the punchline to this cartoon says it all.

Comments (2)

August 10, 2004

Does anybody still believe that the US is in Iraq to liberate it?

You do? What exactly do you think the word “liberate” means?

Comments (3)

August 4, 2004

I’m just sayin’.

Comments (0)

August 2, 2004

I grew up in a time when people talked about a clash between democracy and communism, but that’s like talking about a war between snakes and frisbees.

— Will Shetterly

Keep that in mind when you hear those jokers talking about “democratic-minded strongmen”. They’re not talking about democracy; they’re talking about supporting the snakes against the frisbees.

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You know, back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we’d lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I’ll be damned if all those things didn't come true.

—— James Carville

(Via Brad deLong.)

Comments (2)

June 25, 2004

I know the administration thinks it’s above the law, but this?

Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes.

That’s taking it too far, Mr. Vice President. I want to see some Justice Department memos on this.

(From the Washington Post, via Gwenda Bond.)

Comments (4)

June 23, 2004

Okay, so this morning I saw the following two headlines, or very similar ones, on the Seattle Times and the New York Times, respectively: Bush rejected torture ban and the apparently contradictory Bush prisoner policy set humane tone.

Unfortunately, I didn’t write them down; and I can’t look up the exact phrasing on the web, because they’ve both been changed: to Treat prisoners fairly, Bush said in 2002 and White House says prisoner policy set humane tone, respectively.

What’s up with that?

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Update: Rob provides the actual NYT headline: Orders by Bush about prisoners set humane tone. The Seattle Times headline: Bush disavows ban on torture.

Comments (2)

June 4, 2004