Category: Politics

I’ve been getting a bit behind with my blog-reading (and blogging) for the last few days, mostly because Chris has been visiting. This evening I spent an hour or two catching up on my regular feeds, and then wandered over to Samizdata.net. Buried among a piece on the return of the Transport blog and a rant about Kettering town planning, I encountered a story that provoked a classic double-take. It seems that an increasing number of British pubs and clubs are being required to fingerprint their patrons. Incredulously, I read the background material from the Guardian and the Register, then Guy Herbert’s analysis:

The fingerprinting is epiphenomenon. What’s deeply disturbing here is the construction of new regimes of official control out of powers granted nominally in the spirit of “liberalisation”. The Licensing Act 2003 passed licensing the sale of alcohol and permits for music and dancing – yes, you need a permit to let your customers dance in England and Wales – from magistrates to local authorities. And it provided for local authorities to set conditions on licenses as they saw fit.
Though local authorities are notionally elected bodies, and magistrates appointees, this looked like democratic reform. But all the powers of local authorities are actually exercised by permanent officials – who also tell elected councillors what their duties are. And there are an awful lot of them.
Magistrates used to hear licensing applications quickly. They had other things to do. And they exercised their power judicially: deciding, but not seeking to control. Ms Bradburn and her staff have time to work with the police and the Home Office on innovative schemes. I’ve noted before how simple-sounding powers can be pooled by otherwise separate agencies to common purpose, gaining leverage over the citizen. I call it The Power Wedge.
They are entirely dedicated to making us safer. How terrifying.

I’ve always hung on to my British passport, secure in the knowledge that if things turned pear-shaped in the USA I could always scamper back across the Atlantic to an oasis of relative calm and sanity. Time for Plan B, I think….

Via Sully, a scathing piece by Olberman on the demise of Habeas Corpus.

Glenn Greenwald on the new Lancet/Iraqi/Bloomberg School of Public Health study of Iraqi deaths, and the right-wing blogosphere’s hysterical response:

But here it has been quantified — their war has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings who would be alive today in the absence of their invasion. That number — 600,000 — just sounds so mammoth, almost Holocaust-like in magnitude (hopefully, it goes without saying that I’m not to comparing the Iraq war to the Holocaust, but merely pointing out why I think this study prompted such an intense reaction).
Like children who want what they want without having to pay any price for it, these Bush followers refuse to accept the consequences for their war. So with blind irrationality, they insist that this study is false without having any real idea of whether it is, all because they want it to be false, because they are incapable of accepting the consequences (including, perhaps predominantly, the political costs) for their actions. A refusal to recognize unpleasant facts is hardly a new phenomenon for them, but in this instance, the need to deny facts seems particularly acute.
One other observation: if it could be demonstrated that the findings of this study were accurate, would that change the mind of a single war proponent? Would they suddenly stand up and announce that the war was not worth the costs? I don’t think there’s much doubt about the answer.

From today’s New York Times

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.

How to interpret Magna Carta.
(Via Gen. J.C.Christian, Patriot.)

Exhibit A: Senator Arlen Specter.
Step 1: First excoriate proposed legislation in no uncertain terms:

Specter said hearings before his Judiciary Committee showed that the military Combatant Status Review Tribunals do not have an adequate way of determining whether suspects are enemy combatants.
He charged that by striking habeas corpus rights for terrorism suspects, the bill “would take our civilized society back some 900 years” to a time before the Magna Carta was adopted. He said this was “unthinkable.”
“What this entire controversy boils down to is whether Congress is going to legislate to deny a constitutional right which is explicit in the document of the Constitution itself and which has been applied to aliens by the Supreme Court of the United States,” Specter said. If the bill passes without habeas corpus protections, it will be struck down
by the high court…

Step 2. Vote for it anyway.
(President Bush as King John? Not implausible…..)

Sully has the video of Hillary’s Break-Through Speech against the Bush Cheney administration’s policy on torture.
UPDATE: Russ Feingold was there too.

In a piece entitled The Inanity of Dinesh D’Souza, Ed Brayton takes on the erstwhile right-wing wunderkind. Apparently D’Souza is now arguing that the real source of anti-western jihadism is not oil, or Saudi politics, or Iraq, or Palestinians: it’s all about the provocative nature of the Western liberal life-style. Brayton skewers this argument up beautifully: “they hate us for our freedom, so let’s get rid of our freedom.”
(I guess the Great War On Terrorism is just another skirmish in the The Great American Culture War. Are the neocons hoping to win Pat Buchanan back to their side? Sheesh!)

You can’t make stuff like this up:

AFGHANISTAN’S notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was set up by the Taliban to enforce bans on women doing anything from working to wearing nail varnish or laughing out loud, is to be re-created by the government in Kabul.
The decision has provoked an outcry among women and human rights activists who fear a return to the days when religious police patrolled the streets, beating or arresting any woman who was not properly covered by a burqa or accompanied by a male relative.

Spreading freedom and democracy, eh?
[Hat tip to the General.]

Over at The Belgravia Dispatch Greg has posted a series of interesting emails he’s received on the subject of Israel, Lebanon and US policy. All put recent events in historical context in a way that politicians and journalists have long since forgotten how to do. This caught my eye:

Israel is radicalizing people who have little use for armed militia, but have less use for being indiscriminately bombed out of their homes and livelihoods. The Germans were fond of “community punishment” techniques during their battles with European resistance movements during the war, and we all know how much that endeared the Germans to their fellow Europeans. Giving a blank cheque to Israel is as mad as Kaiser Wilhelm giving a blank cheque to Conrad von Hötzendorf in 1914.
Of course, our government will take no such drastic action, particularly not having “committed” itself as it has, but how ironic that fifty years ago this summer our government rather brutally brought the Suez crisis to an end by squeezing Britain until the pips squeaked. I would defy anyone to reconcile the strategic worldview of the United States as reflected by these two seminal events.

Indeed. But then considering Eisenhower and Bush, maybe the contradiction isn’t so surprising.