Not fun for everyone

Getting drunk and driving 100 miles an hour is also fun, but it’s still illegal. Same with crystal meth. The point is there is a social cost to allowing recreational gun ownership, and gun owners need to acknowledge we are all paying a certain price for their entertainment. For those of us who never have and never will own a gun, it is most definitely not worth it.

Sandy Hook

I continue to be amazed that people's commitment to orthodoxy, against all available evidence, comes before their commitment to their children. Consider our approach to global warming (and environment policy generally), birth control, the education system, social security, fiscal policy, gun control, etc. What binds these together is, basically, we really don't care about our kids all that much when it comes down to it, and this seems more true in America than in any other western society.

Of Fiscal Cliffs and Talmudic Interpretations

Classic Josh, but I'm not sure he should leave the Jesuits out of this.

No Comment Necessary

Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi!

Beirut!

The 1983 attack on US Marines barracks in Lebanon that killed 241 Americans. (Two hundred and forty one Americans killed, in a single attack -- the deadliest single attack on US troops overseas since WWII.) Was Reagan a closet-Muslim sympathizer? We need hearings to find out what really happened in Beirut, who knew what and when, and why the American public was not informed earlier. We're concerned about 241 Americans who died in Beirut. Their families need to know the circumstances, why it happened, how it happened, and where responsibility lies. That's all. That's all that we're seeking. We're not seeing a confrontation with anyone. We're not trying to quote 'take on anyone.'

Was There an Election?

Haven't Checked in with the General Recently

Forgive me, General, for thou art always entertaining.

Biggest Mistake of Obama's Presidency

Selecting a bunch of anti-Keynesians and following their advice early on was a bone-head move.  I posted at the time that Obama should have listened to - instead of rudely denigrating - Krugman's warnings that Obama's inaugural budget was not remotely bold enough.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Obama is only a pale imitation of a Keynesian in comparison with the GOP's hero, Ronald Reagan - such is the insane era we live it when one can say that Obama's biggest mistake was lacking the courage to be half the Keynesian Ronald Reagan was.

It's not so funny when you start to think about it

. . . and realise just how accurately it describes the state of our democracy.

Yawn . . .

This evidently comes as a surprise to people.

Who ever could have guessed such things go on in the halls of power?

Meanwhile, back in the U.S. of A., the only surprise these days is that some in Rupert's own family appear to have briefly strayed off-message:

"[Matthew] Freud told the New York Times he was "ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to [cue stifled gag reflex]".

Freud, who is married to Elisabeth, Rupert Murdoch's second daughter, was speaking to the NYT for a profile of Ailes, who is President of Fox News, and prefaced his comment by saying that he was "by no means alone within he family or the company" in holding such hostile views of Fox News.

I suspect Wendi has been dispatched to deal with Freud's intemperate remarks.  She is definitely the one to fear:

Wanker of the decade

Congratulations, Tommy - no-one deserves the honour more than you.

"The legal opinions have grave weaknesses"

So, belatedly, a memo is now in the public domain. In truth I can't understand why this makes much of a difference. Okay, yes, perhaps this is a smoking gun signifying the Bush administration was told point-blank that its policy amounted to war crimes:

"We are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systemic interrogation practices similar to those in question here."

And, yes, the Bush White House did everything possible to destroy all copies of this particular memo, figuring it might be difficult to explain to a media, even one as craven and compromised as ours turned out to be.

But, on the substance, there is nothing new here that we didn't already know. As early as April 2009, Philip Zelikow wrote, despairing, about this systematic and brazen violation of some of America's most core principles:

". . . [T]he issue is not about who or what [the detainees] are. It is about who or what we are."

Mr. Zelikow chaired the 9/11 Commission, which suggests he is someone who is relatively unimpeachable even by today's woeful standard of political discourse.

In 2010, the Obama White House decided officially to turn a blind eye. The legal memos justifying state-sanctioned torture - the ones that were released - were on their face patently ridiculous, so much so that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility recommended disciplinary action against the responsible lawyers. Obama's Assistant Attorney General overruled the OPR in a stunning display of political cynicism. John Yoo (Bush's Assist. Attorney General who was most directly responsible for justifying torture, and who seemed to revel in his role) continued to double down, insisting that the U.S. president is not bound by archaic constraints like laws when there are wars to fight, including those without end, like our current Global War on Unspecified Threats. And, sure enough, the incompetent newbie lawyers brought into the Justice Department to write the travesties masquerading as legal opinions that enabled these state-sanctioned crimes, lawyers who were barely-trained but nevertheless unleashed on an unsuspecting world courtesy of the Federalist Society and third-rate law schools, have gone on to comfy sinecures elsewhere.

It was at about this time that I lost faith in Obama.

Unravelling

Thoughtful essay from Edward Luce. The money quote:

In daggers-drawn Washington, Democrats and Republicans have been able to agree only on a certain type of spending cut. The bulk are targeted at the one slice of the federal budget that qualifies as investment – “domestic non-defence discretionary spending”, which accounts for only 12 per cent of the pie. This includes research and development, infrastructure and education programmes – areas that matter greatly to America’s future competitiveness. They could be described as the “tomorrow” part of the US budget. The remainder, which is mostly healthcare for retirees, pensions, defence and interest payments on past debt, might be seen as the “yesterday” portion. Yet Washington’s first instinct in the new era of austerity was to shortchange the future. There will be more to come even if Obama is re-elected.

Abiding genius

. . . I continue to wonder at how he gets away with it . . .

Oh, Tommy . . .

You really should have kept your trap shut.

You really have nothing to say about Iraq that has any credibility, unless, perhaps, it's an apology.

You now:

As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track? After 9/11, the idea of helping to change the context of Arab politics and address the root causes of Arab state dysfunction and Islamist terrorism — which were identified in the 2002 Arab Human Development Report as a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge and a deficit of women’s empowerment — seemed to me to be a legitimate strategic choice.

You then:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This. . . We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth . . .

We're getting closer to the day . . .

. . . when someone actually writes a book about what actually happened during the Bush administration. I hope I live to see it.

Just like ancient Rome

Paul and his whining:

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile".

At least he attracts good readers with interesting things to say - the comments are better:

As an engineer and a one-time scientist I will tell you that all the admininstrations since Nixon have been anti-science. Oh, I forgot Reagan. He was big on defense science. His time was a boom period for those of us in toy development.

Ever since global warming and the end of cheap energy became obvious to scientist, corporations have been threatened by science. The first move to eliminate government funding of basic research began in 1972 under Nixon. This when the first warnings of the end of cheap oil and the effects of over-population and pollution came to light. A Rand Corporation white paper predicted how a rapid growth in population would produce dire consequences for human kind; that was 1969.

Corporations found it easier to turn down the volume by turning down the funding. That way, the average investor can stay fat, dumb and happy. Then, they started buying scientists to spin their own story. So, here we are with pseudo science to match the few who will speak up. Fortunately, there are more social-leaning governments in Europe to speak the truth.

Listen, the cheap oil started running out in 2003 when the Saudis lost one of their big reservoirs (background: Hubbert's Peak-wikapedia). The ACS published results showing that mercury contamination in fish caught in mountain streams match the levels in those raised in farms --- and, that level is near the danger threshhold. The temperature rise we are measuring annually will accelerate once the ice caps are melted year-round and this will happen in only a couple of dozen year --- and, it can't be reversed.

How do the rich benefit if the earth is over-populated, hungry, and in the dark. The rich always benefit. Look at Rome; you just climb higher over the corpses.

Finally . . .

Someone makes the connection:

"If James Murdoch was giving his lecture this year," Thompson writes, "I'd suggest he amended only one word in that final sentence. The only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is not profit. Nor who you know. Nor what corners you can cut. It's integrity."

Better late than never.

Best Fiscal Policy Proposal Yet

To end our long-term fiscal crisis I'm with Paul. I, too, believe that our only option is commence sub-orbital hostilities against the invading Venusian space armada.

Go back to law school

Ain't it the truth - commentary on the 11th Circuit travesty from an always-thoughtful commenter on TPM:

I'm a lawyer. It's hard to explain just how outside the mainstream this kind result would have been just 5-10 years ago.

I graduated a top law school in '02. If you had written something like this on your 1L Con Law exam you would have gotten an F, because it's not just a wrong view, it's a view that ignores 60 years of precedent.

To overturn the health care law is to erase the profound turn that the Supreme Court took in 1937 when it rejected the Lochner Era approach and adopted the modern/New Deal era approach to jurisprudence.

The idea that we're even having this conversation - and the Circuit courts are splitting on this question! - suggests just how far we've come in a very, very short time. The movement conservatives have all come out of the closet - even the ones on the federal bench. They smell a final victory: a return to Gilded Age America.