Category: Quick Hits

For the first time in over two years I am taking a little time off of work (emphasis on "little", as I'll still be working while I'm visiting people) to travel back to the Midwest. I'll still be updating daily, so it shouldn't make any difference here. Between packing, finishing up some stuff at work, and preparing for a Big Show (opening for Dan Telfer) I'm on the weeds.

Given that the last three posts have generated a silly amount of incoming link traffic I'm going to punt Wednesday's post to Thursday and use today to catch up. It seems like a lot of discussions from recent posts are ongoing and there's plenty to keep the incoming traffic busy. So it's a good time for a weekday off.

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Last night was a comedy night, so a real post is still forthcoming. For now, I said the following about Evan Bayh in March of 2010 while criticizing Ezra Klein's overly deferential interview of the retiring gasbag:

Now that he has had this spiritual epiphany he's quitting a position of tremendous power because attempting to fix the problem would be too hard. Thanks for playing. I have fifty bucks that says he takes a lobbying job six months after his term ends.

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I want my $50. And for the Chamber of Commerce of all places. What, Lockheed Martin wasn't hiring?

It goes without saying that I am not a big War on Terror / Fuck Our Rights Because I'm Scared of the Brown People guy. So it's somewhat surprising to find myself with mixed feelings bordering on ambivalence at the revelation that the recently concluded "Special Registration" program in Homeland Security netted 11 individuals with al-Qaeda ties out of 85,000 Muslim registrants.

Part of me understands that I am expected to decry the program as racial profiling (see the Wiki for a list of foreign nationals who were required to participate). Another part of me is supposed to mock the program's amusingly low success rate (0.01%) as an indicator of its futility. Yet despite what the right likes to use as a straw man of Libruls, I understand a number of key aspects of the complicated question of rights, the law, and non-citizen residents in the U.S.

1. Finding 11 individuals – let's assume, perhaps tenuously, that "ties to al-Qaeda" is defined in a reasonably accurate, meaningful way – is neither surprising nor insignificant. We would expect and anticipate that 99.99% (literally, in this case) of entrants from these 25 countries will have no links to any kind of terrorist activity.
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It only takes a very small number of individuals to execute a potentially serious terrorist plot.

2. Terrorism is a real threat and DHS has a legitimate mandate to prevent it, within the limits set by the law.

3. There is a reasonable suspicion that entrants from the countries identified are more likely – again, 0.01% vs. 0.0001% – to have terrorist ties.

4. Non-citizens can legally be subjected to reasonable requirements like registering their presence in the country. The NYT reports that the program identified "more than 10,000" individuals who were not in the country legally – either visa overstays or undocumented entrants. I have no problem with the government enforcing existing laws requiring people to have valid visas to reside here. It shocks me that anyone would.

5. Non-citizens are not treated equally in terms of the requirements placed upon them.

We can argue the right or wrong of this, but that is a separate argument. The legal reality is that neither the U.S. nor any other nation on Earth treats all non-citizens and entrants identically irrespective of country of origin. This does not imply that the U.S. can do anything it chooses to immigrants or entrants, but only that it is not legally required to subject everyone to the exact same standards in issuing visas or requiring registration.

6. Any sovereign country has a vested interest in keeping accurate records of who is coming in and out of the country.

7. We do a shit job of #6, and it's not productive to have a hissy fit every time the federal government tries to place additional requirements (you know, like not overstaying visas by 15 years) on non-citizen residents or visitors. They have rights. But the government also has legitimate interests.

There. I guess I'm a closet neocon after all.
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Something about the name "Memorial Day" makes one think of the past – most likely the fact that it has the same latin root as "memory". Every year on Memorial Day we're encouraged to take a minute to remember the people who have died in the line of duty in the military. Inevitably this takes us back to grainy black and white pictures of Dad or Granddad in their World War II uniforms, or maybe Uncle So and So who fought in Vietnam. Lord knows the cable networks will be loaded to the gunwales with World War II themed programming marathons to help nudge you in that direction.

From the Associated Press three days ago:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Nine NATO service members were killed Thursday in Afghanistan, including seven U.S. troops among eight who died when a powerful bomb exploded in a field where they were patrolling on foot, officials said.

Two Afghan policemen also died and two others were wounded in the explosion in the mountainous Shorabak district of Kandahar province, 12 miles (19 kilometers) from the Pakistan border, said Gen. Abdul Raziq, chief of the Afghan border police in the province. "Two months ago, we cleared this area of terrorists, but still they are active there," Raziq said.

(snip)

Roadside bombs killed 268 American troops in Afghanistan last year, a 60 percent increase over the previous year, even as the Pentagon employed new measures to counter the Taliban's makeshift weapon of choice. Defense officials attributed the rise in casualties to the surge in U.

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S. forces in Afghanistan last year.

The number of U.S. troops wounded by what the military terms improvised explosive devices also soared, according to the most recent U.S. defense figures. There were 3,366 U.S. service members injured in IED blasts – up from the 1,211 hurt by the militants' crudely made bombs in 2009, the figures show.

Despite the fact that the death of Bin Laden pushed it even further out of sight and out of mind, the ongoing wars in the Middle East (soon to celebrate their tenth anniversary) are producing more casualties every day. Today. Currently. Right now. Sure, it's great that we all remember Granddad on Memorial Day, but take a few minutes today to think about the people who are being added to the rolls of the dead and wounded as we're sitting around the grill or pool.

These are current events. That we prefer to think of it solely as a historical phenomenon is part of the reason that it continues with no end in sight.

Unfortunately I've spent a few long days writing the stuff I actually get paid to write, which means I'm out of words and I will have to throw link salad at you today.

1. Speaking of "enduring appeal", how about that Tea Party? Here's a real photo of a recent TP event in South Carolina. Granted, keynote carny Donald Trump canceled at the last minute…but even minus the headliner you'd think they could get more than the estimated "crowd" of 15 to show up.

2. The upcoming election is going to see a revival of the 2004 Karl Rove strategy of driving up far right turnout by putting gay marriage referendums on the ballot in key states. I question the wisdom of that from a political perspective. It's only a matter of time until one of these measures gets defeated, and you have to wonder if it will happen in Minnesota. That's just the kind of population to be more annoyed than enthused by this sort of red meat being thrown at Bible thumpers. Social attitudes about gay issues are changing rapidly and it's possible that the GOP is going back to the well one too many times with this trick.

3. Give it a few more weeks and penis cancer will have a higher approval rating than Rick Scott.

4. David Frum has a very interesting commentary on the right shooting itself in the foot with the wildly unpopular Paul Ryan budget; party activists demand that candidates swear fealty to it under penalty of death (ask Gingrich), all but guaranteeing that they'll be radioactive to voters outside of the GOP base. I caution against reading too much into special elections, but the numbers from NY-26 are alarming to conservatives like Frum who can think about things and understand numbers.

5. Watch Rob Woodall, the GOP Rep who made waves earlier this week by telling a constituent to "take responsibility" for her own health care rather than asking the government to give her Medicare. When questioned about why he doesn't lead by example and decline the government health plan (note: He has repeatedly advocated abolishing not only Medicare but all employee-provided health insurance as well) in favor of going out and purchasing his own insurance – like he tells his constituents to do. His brilliant response? "Because it's free." I haven't seen a man eat a bullet on video like that since Budd Dwyer.

More soon.

Read the comments (and the editorial, which is almost as bad) to learn that the USPS should be eliminated so the free market (UPS, FedEx, etc.) can do the job better, cheaper, and more efficiently.

Makes perfect sense, right? The free market does everything better!
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Which is why the USPS already subcontracts express deliveries to FedEx, and FedEx relies on the USPS to carry the majority of its domestic packages because they can't do it themselves cost effectively.

You know how I feel about making predictions.

There is relatively little to be gained by being correct and quite a bit of embarrassment to be endured on account of a spectacularly incorrect prediction.
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Sometimes the effects of bad predictions are greatly magnified by proximity to the event that disproves them.
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Did the lauded economist Irving Fisher ever live down saying "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau" three days before the great crash of 1929? Can you imagine how many times George Will has been taunted for having written "Liberalization is a ploy…the Wall will remain" on Nov. 9, 1989 – the day the Berlin Wall came down? Talk about humiliating.

Now imagine that you are a law professor who turns the opportunity to write an op-ed for syndication and you use this opportunity to go on an extended bitch session about the failures of the current President. Then imagine that you say something like this…

Meanwhile, on foreign policy – another Carter weak point – Obama also looks worse.

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Carter blew it with Iran, encouraging the Iranian armed forces to stay in their barracks, while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's radical Islamists (whom Carter thought of as "reformers") took power, and then approved the ill-conceived hostage rescue mission that ended with ignominious failure in the desert. Obama, by contrast, could only wish for such success.

…and the column was published on the same day that the President authorized a high-risk mission that ended up accomplishing something George Bush tried to do nine years ago. I bet you'd feel pretty embarrassed. Unless of course you're Ol' Perfesser Dumbass, who inhabits a world in which facts are so irrelevant that butchering them is of no consequence to the smug perception of one's own brilliance.

These 10:00 PM EST games in Vancouver are going to be the death of me, but the sting is lessened considerably by Roberto Luongo's annual mental breakdown in net for the Canucks.
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At some point in every series he will surrender a garbage goal; thereafter he goes to pieces and approximates a human sieve.
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I will try to honor the No Politics rule sometime on Friday. For now, however, please do take 15 minutes (It's Friday, right?

You're not working) to read this excellent take on the current state of U.S. foreign policy and the "democratization" of the Middle East. Do yourself a favor and do not look at the author, lest its baggage lead you to reject the argument out of hand.

The whole Washington Consensus thing worked when we were half of the global economy.

Now, not so much.

I'm a little spent from the Atlas Shrugged opus on Monday so I will confine myself to a brief question today.

Obama has caved (stop me if you've heard that one before) and accepted the right-wing frame of the budget debate, thus the argument is no longer Austerity vs. Keynesian Growth but juvenile bickering over how to pursue austerity.
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This creates the necessary usual illusion of choice and debate in a political system that operates in a shockingly narrow intellectual and ideological envelope. As usual the right gets what it wants and all of the fuss amounts to rearranging deck chairs.

So remind me again how austerity is supposed to help. As Mike asks and I have asked before, let's say we have a magic wand that balances the budget for us; then what? What is the benefit? Do interest rates fall? They're already insanely low. Does unemployment fall? If so, how and why would we expect that? Are there businesses out there that want to hire but won't because of the budget deficit?
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This is what I get from the statements by Paul Ryan and like-minded conservatives: If we cut spending it will restore "confidence" to "the market" and suddenly the economy will start growing in leaps and bounds.

Phase One: Collect underpants / cut spending
Phase Two: ???
Phase Three: Economic growth / profits

I am sick to death of hearing about the deficit and austerity-as-panacea arguments that punt on the issue of what this is supposed to accomplish entirely. To hear Mitch McConnell tell the tale, we will cut entitlement programs and then, I guess, somehow, everything is just going to be better. Magical sparkleponies will appear in your front yard shitting glittery, low fat (but full flavored!) frozen yogurt with your favorite toppings.

See, it's not really the ends that matter to the right, because the means – cutting taxes, gutting the welfare state, etc.
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– are the ends.

On account of a comedy show on Tuesday night and the fact that The Colbert Report was all over my intended topic (and did a much better job of the funny than I would have to boot), I am taking the easy way out for the moment. Enjoy one of the rare moments in which something so idiotic and unintentionally hilarious is said on Fox News that Stephen Colbert, a man who has built an entire media career around the ability to play it straight, can't help but break character and laugh his ass off on camera.

I assume it will surprise no one to learn that the statement in question comes from Fox & Friends.

The suicide rate among the cast and crew on Fox & Friends must be astronomical.

I gave out free breast exams at Walgreen's a few times. Now I'm not allowed back.