Category: Politics

James Wolcott describes: “watching Senator Joe Lieberman […] drone his support for the nomination of Condi Rice as Secretary of Clueless, arguing that we should celebrate the breakthrough confirmation of an African-American woman for such a powerful post, even though her being African-American and a woman were irrelevant to her qualifications. Then why bring it up? I suppose it’s progress of a sort when a duplicitous incompetent can be promoted regardless of race or gender […] but it ought to make for a muted celebration.” Indeed.

(Via Jon, who manages to be amused by it – no small achievement.)

Marty Lederman has once again taken aim at Heather MacDonald, self-appointed apologist for administation policy about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In a recent item in Balkinization, he writes “Let’s be very clear about this: The DoD General Counsel (who’s recently been renominated for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit) concluded that threats of killing a detainee’s family members, and waterboarding, and forced nudity, and the use of dogs to induce stress, etc., not only did not violate the UCMJ, but are ‘humane’! There is no indication in the public record that Secretary Rumsfeld or any other high-level DoD official ever contradicted or overruled these legal conclusions — and every indication that Rumsfeld agreed with them.”

And while it’s a point that has been made before, let me repeat: would Ms. MacDonald regard such policies as “humane” and “legal” if they were applied to captured US troops by another power – North Vietnam, say, or perhaps Iran? (Arguing for a difference between regular troops and “terrorists” won’t wash – most of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib had not been legally classified, and the presumption should have been that they were therefore covered by Geneva.) Such an acknowledgement is unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon….

(Via Sully.)

From Reuters via Yahoo!: “White House spokesman Scott McClellan said […] that ‘based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action’ — war with Iraq — in order to ‘confront a threat posed by Saddam Hussein.”

Since we know today that Saddam Hussein possessed no WMDs, what exactly was the threat that he posed? Does McClellan realize how stupid he sounds?

The number of people who believe that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq actually possessed weapons of mass destruction must by now be in single digits. However the fact that the US has finally abandoned the search for WMD still seems newsworthy – after all, wasn’t a war launched on the strength of that falsehood, resulting in thousands of deaths and years of bloody chaos? But as Salon reports: “If you missed this bit of news, that’s because in our town’s newspaper, a little publication called the New York Times […] it was buried inside on A10 in a 240-word news brief.” (My emphasis.)

(I can’t wait to see how Daniel Okrent, the NYT “public editor”, explains this one.)

As River reports, “technically, we don’t know the candidates. We know the principal heads of the lists but we don’t know who exactly will be running. It really is confusing. They aren’t making the lists public because they are afraid the candidates will be assassinated”

An election in which the voters don’t know who the candidates are? That sounds weird enough. But then there are the voter registration cards:

[O]n all the voting cards, the gender of the voter, regardless of sex, is labeled “male”. […] Why is the sex on the card anyway? […] Some are saying that many of the more religiously inclined families won’t want their womenfolk voting so it might be permissible for the head of the family to take the women’s ID and her ballot and do the voting for her. Another theory is that this ‘mistake’ will make things easier for people making fake IDs to vote in place of females.

Apparently there’s a brisk trade in voting cards: the going rate is around $400. But at least River’s family has received voting cards. In many places, election officials are refusing to carry out voter registration because of death threats.

A few days ago I noted here that American popular opinion seems to have shifted sharply against the war in Iraq. This provoked a plaintive – indeed anguished – comment from Mark: “Why oh why did they have to wait until AFTER the election to decide this?” It’s a good question, and Josh Marshall has an interesting take on it over at Talking Points Memo.

Josh first agrees with Kevin Drum that the main reason is quite simple: support has been declining ever since the initial invasion, and the latest numbers simply reflect that trend. But why did pro-war sentiment seem to to hold up during the election campaign? Josh suggests that “during the slugfest of the campaign, supporting Bush just meant supporting the war and this is what people told pollsters when they were asked, because one question was almost a proxy for the other.” Given that “close to 50% of Americans were dead set on voting for President Bush almost no matter what”, it’s clear why support for the war stayed above 50%. (Imagine “how many conservatives […] would have been so staunch in their support for the war if it were being fought under a President Gore or a President Clinton.”) And the result is that “the end of the campaign season has departisanized the war, [and people] are now freer to see the situation in Iraq a bit more on its own terms”.

(Memo to self: During the run-up to the election, I used to read TPM all the time. I think that after November 2nd I tuned out a lot of the political blogs. Bad idea. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.)

In today’s Boston Globe, Robert Kuttner nails the myth about “The Social Security Crisis”. It’s just that: a myth. There is no crisis. Key quote: “In June, the bipartisan Congressional Budget office used more realistic assumptions about economic growth. CBO puts the first shortfall year at 2052, not 2042, and it projects Social Security’s 75-year shortfall at only about four-10ths of one percent of gross domestic product. Currently, that’s about $40 billion a year, or one-fifth of the revenues that the Bush administration gave up in tax cuts for the wealthy. Simply restoring pre-Bush tax rates on the richest one percent of Americans could bring the Social Security system into balance indefinitely, without reducing promised payouts by one penny.”

And why do so many Democrats as well as Republicans use the language of crisis? Kuttner’s explanation is that “many well-meaning Democrats who defend the Social Security system want to be absolutely [certain] that its funding is rock solid. So [they] talk of its shortfall and offer different ways to make up the gap. Unfortunately, that tends to play into Republican hands.”

If Republicans are ideologically opposed to the idea of Social Security, that’s their right. But if the only way to argue for the position is to lie about the situation, that doesn’t say much for their case.

Poll: Most Americans Think Iraq War Not Worth Fighting (washingtonpost.com): “[A]ccording to a Washington Post-ABC News poll […] 56 percent of the country now believes that the cost of the conflict in Iraq outweighs the benefits, while 42 percent disagreed. It marked the first time since the war began that a clear majority of Americans have judged the war to have been a mistake.”

(And they want Bush to fire Rumsfeld. Doh!)

I’ve been watching the current debate on EU admission for Turkey with a fair amount of confusion. Understandably, much of the discussion has revolved around such issues as European “identity”, religion, the effect on the labour market, human rights, Cyprus, Armenia, the military in politics, and so on. The question of precedent is also critical: if Turkey, why not Russia? Etcetera. Things have also been complicated by the insensitive meddling of the US administration.
Setting aside such issues, I am surprised that there hasn’t been much said about the sheer volatility of the Turkish economy. Even the Economist profile doesn’t discuss this as one might expect. The latest EU report makes sobering reading. Recent inflation rates between 28% and 101%; public sector deficits between 10% and 28%; exchange rates oscillating wildly, dropping 50% and then gaining 12%. In part this seems a consequence of the fact around 50% of all business falls into the “underground economy” category. It is hard to imagine how to integrate such an economy into a supra-national body that has been defined since day one by economic convergence.

David Brock of MediaMatters.org just posted a scathing attack on Bill O’Reilly (King of the Unfair and Unbalanced). After listing the numerous occasions on which O’Reilly had attacked both Brock and MediaMatters, Brock calls him out:
As you can see, Mr. O’Reilly, you have repeatedly and personally attacked me, Media Matters for America, and my fine staff, calling us “vile,” “despicable,” and “weasels,” and comparing us to the Ku Klux Klan, Castro, Mao, and the Nazis. And you have refused my repeated requests to appear on your broadcast.
You once offered your viewers your definition of the word “coward.” On the January 5, 2004, O’Reilly Factor, you declared: “If you attack someone publicly, as these men did to me, you have an obligation to face the person you are smearing. If you don’t, you are a coward.”
Well, Mr. O’Reilly, you have attacked me publicly on numerous occasions, and you refuse to face me. You, sir, are a coward — by your own definition of the term.
Frankly, I don’t know why anyone would want to share the same studio with that bombastic bigot, but if O’Reilly continues to refuse Brock’s request we’ll know him for what he is. No surprise, of course.
(Via Sully)