If you look over to the right, under the “About” label, you’ll see a link called “You need to hire these people.” You need to go click on that link.
(Note: This is a “sticky” post, meaning it stays at the top of the blog’s front page. New content is added directly underneath it.)
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews must be one of the dumbest, or at least one of the least imaginative and least empathetic, people on the planet:
Chris Matthews just implied that modern warfare is much harder on soldiers than wars have ever been before because they are under so much more stress. He called it a “constant booby-trap” because they might be killed by an IED. Cliff Van Zandt agreed that this is worse than soldiers commonly experience.
Oh, really, Chris? Tell me, have you ever read “Over the Top,” by Arthur Guy Empey, an American who enlisted and served in the British Army during World War I, before the U.S. entered the war? Or “The Forgotten Soldier,” a German-French infantryman’s account of the Wehrmacht’s s defeat on the Eastern Front during World War II? I challenge you to read them and conclude that modern warfare is harder on soldiers. Or Eugene Sledge’s “With the Old Breed,” his account of serving with the First Marine Division on Peleliu and Okinawa, two of the Pacific war’s bloodiest battles?
Or if you don’t want to read about it, how ’bout asking this guy:
Or these, in the Balkans:
Or check out the ossuary at Verdun. This big monument thingie? Full of bones:
Or the men in this burial detail:
Or these vets of the Champagne campaign:
Or some of the 70,000 missing — missing! — from the Somme, where 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day.
Or these guys at Ypres. Note the stylish facial gear:
All wars are like this, Chris. Always have been. Always will be. That’s why it’s such a lousy idea to start one, particularly when you don’t absolutely have to.
Jon Stewart goes all Glenn Beck on … Glenn Beck:
The No. 3 best-selling book on U.S. campuses right now: “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.“
This probably should not make me feel as good as it does.
That’s the only logical conclusion to which one can come after reading about the House GOP health-care reform plan:
Late last night, the Congressional Budget Office released its initial analysis of the health-care reform plan that Republican Minority Leader John Boehner offered as a substitute to the Democratic legislation. CBO begins with the baseline estimate that 17 percent of legal, non-elderly residents won’t have health-care insurance in 2010. In 2019, after 10 years of the Republican plan, CBO estimates that …17 percent of legal, non-elderly residents won’t have health-care insurance. The Republican alternative will have helped 3 million people secure coverage, which is barely keeping up with population growth. Compare that to the Democratic bill, which covers 36 million more people and cuts the uninsured population to 4 percent.
But maybe, you say, the Republican bill does a really good job cutting costs. According to CBO, the GOP’s alternative will shave $68 billion off the deficit in the next 10 years. The Democrats, CBO says, will slice $104 billion off the deficit.
The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It’s already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It’s already made its compromises with reality. It’s already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.
I’m not going to sit here and argue that the Democratic plan is perfect. It’s not. But yesterday a number of prominent Republican leaders joined tens of thousands of teabaggers in DC to mount a protest that, among other bits of incisive logic, compared the Democratic plan to the Holocaust. And this is what their fellow Republicans offer as an alternative? Why not just defend the status quo and be done with it? Oh, right, because that wouldn’t deliver as much money into the hands of private insurance companies. Silly me.
I hope North Carolina’s Sue Myrick and Virginia Foxx are proud to be associated with this.
Honestly. Not even a real vampire squid would steal flu vaccine from kids.
Why you would want to is a whole ‘nother question, but Make Your Own Academic Sentence is the answer!
The Justice Department’s decision not to challenge a federal district judge’s order that a Kuwaiti Airlines engineer held at Guantanamo for seven years must be released is a major embarassment to the Pentagon’s military commission system.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed in an e-mail that there will be no appeal of U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s September order absolving Fouad al Rabia of being a key aide to Osama bin Laden. Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling was highly critical of the government for holding Rabiah for so long. She noted that not even his interrogators believed his confession, which she noted he made after an interrogator told him it was the only way he’d be released. He was fat, had washed out of required military training in Kuwait, and had an easily verified history of going to countries like Afghanistan to do humanitarian work — which is what he said he was doing when he was turned over to U.S. forces. …
Why the Pentagon insisted on moving forward with a military commission trial against him when it was pretty clear to even his interrogators he was the wrong guy may never really be understood. There’s no will to hold anyone accountable in the military for such egregious error. The Pentagon hasn’t dropped the charges against Rabia and probably won’t until he has physically left Guantanamo.
Yup, we’re all of us just fine with depriving a guy of human rights for seven freakin’ years.
Well, OK, not quite all of us:
In the meantime, Rabia’s attorney, David J. Cynamon of the D.C. law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, has asked the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Inspectors General of the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the co-chairs of the President’s Advisory Board on Intelligence to investigate what he calls Rabia’s “abuse and torture” at the hands of U.S. interrogators. “I’m not going away quietly on this one,” he said in an e-mail message to [Miami Herald reporter Carol] Rosenberg. You can read his requests here.
So how much hell can this lawyer raise? I’m guessing not much, but things’ll get real interesting real fast if I’m wrong.
Zero Hedge points out an, ahem, interesting pattern:
ZH adds:
Is this a ponzi scheme? We surely don’t know absent additional information (which will never be forthcoming, despite that GS is a public company). Is this comparable to the returns generated by a ponzi scheme? Absof—–lutely.
Say it with me, kids: Rigged. Game.
From Jason Linkin of HuffPo, on the teabaggers’ failure to capture the 23rd Congressional District seat Tuesday, thus handing the seat to a Democrat for the first time since the Grant administration (or thereabouts): “Sooner or later, someone should maybe point out that you cannot ameliorate actual problems by drawing a Hitler mustache on them.”
And, finally, even if you’re a Democrat there’s reason to rejoice at the defeat of Jon Corzine in Tuesday’s gubernatorial race in New Jersey. It means that someone high-ranking at Goldman Sachs has finally lost his job.
Thanks. I’ll be here all week. Y’all try the veal.
The good news: my friend Margaret is both jogging and blogging. Y’all go read her. She’s funny.
The bad news: American copyright law, which is where ingenuity has gone to die for the past 15 years or so, is going global.
This is stunning, and I’d like to think that it will leave a mark:
MILAN — An Italian court convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel on kidnapping charges Wednesday in a stern rebuke to the U.S. government’s long-standing practice of covertly seizing terrorism suspects abroad without a warrant.
The guilty verdicts are the only instance in which CIA operatives have faced a criminal trial for the controversial tactic of extraordinary rendition, under which terrorism suspects are abducted in one country and forcibly transported to another.
The CIA began carrying out renditions during the Clinton administration but intensified their frequency under orders from the Bush White House after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The Obama administration said in August that it would continue the practice, but pledged to take steps to ensure that rendition targets are not tortured, either by the CIA or by foreign spy agencies.
In winning the guilty verdicts, Italian prosecutors took a contrary view, saying they were determined to enforce the law in spite of political pressure from Rome and Washington to drop the case.
Yes, I’d like to think that it will leave a mark. However, I know it won’t.
For the U.S. government to do anything other than ignore this ruling would mean it would see itself as obliged to follow the law, and as we all know, that’s just so 9/10. The most the government will do is warn these 22 folks that there are certain other countries they probably ought not visit without armed bodyguards, and let it go at that.
(Memo to wingnuts: seeing the government as obliged to follow the law DOES NOT EQUATE TO “blaming America first.” Not on any logical level. Not anywhere in this dimension or any other I’ve ever frequented.)
Aimai at No More Mr. Nice Blog has a nice little summary of my thoughts on this case:
I’ve just spent several months explaining to my anxious, enraged, Obama supporting parental unit that no one who gets elected to our imperial presidency–neither democrat, nor republican, will ever roll back the tide of illegal and immoral actions that were taken in defense of our imperial way of life. Especially not internationally. But I’d like to see more discussion of this and its implication for our country going forward. Its not, to me, a question of supporting Obama or being disappointed in him. Its just a question of whether our country will ever voluntarily stop raping, torturing, looting, and kidnapping for international gain and advantage. Or whether we will simply, like other once great powers, stop using our privileged position only once we’ve lost the privilege to other, stronger, powers.
And there will be other stronger powers, almost certainly within my remaining lifetime. Right now we’re spending more on our military than the rest of the world combined, and that’s just the part that’s on-budget. It’s almost $700 billion in one year, and we’re sitting here claiming we can’t afford $90 billion a year for the same level of health care pretty much guaranteed to pretty much everyone in pretty much every other Western industrialized country.
The historian Paul Kennedy, in his 1987 book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” talked about the concept of “imperial overstretch,” the economic havoc that condition causes and the grim prognosis history suggests is in store. To his credit, he cautioned that he was not trying to predict the future; at the same time, his research suggests we must acknowledge that 1) we have become a military imperialist enterprise and that 2) in no other such case in recorded history have things ended well.
UPDATE: From ABC:
One of the 23 Americans convicted today by an Italian court says the United States “broke the law” in the CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.
“And we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this,” said former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson.
Former CIA intelligence officer Sabrina deSousa says the US “abandoned and betrayed” her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.
DeSousa says the U.S. “abandoned and betrayed” her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping. She was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison.
Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News that the trial was a disaster for CIA officers like DeSousa on the frontline.
“I think these people have been put out there. They’ve been hung out to dry. They’re taking the fall potentially for a decision that was made by their superiors in our agencies. It’s the wrong place to go.”
Now, here’s a question: How would Americans feel if Italian spies landed on our shores, kidnapped these 23 people and took them to, say, Turkey or Syria for torture? Or just kidnapped them to Italy and put them in prison there? How do you think we would be likely to respond?
We really owe Newsweek a debt of gratitude:
Newsweek magazine is teaming up with an oil-industry lobbying group to host an event on climate-change and energy issues involving lawmakers, just as the Senate gets set to take up legislation on the subject.
The panel discussion, entitled “Climate and Energy Policy: Moving?,” will feature Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, and, as moderator, Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, according to an email invitation sent by a Newsweek business staffer and obtained by TPMmuckraker.
Because were it not for Newsweek, our dedicated but financially strapped congresscritters, who are about to take up climate-change legislation, would have no idea how the oil bidness feels about climate-change legislation.
I don’t know how much the real world cares, which is one reason I’m late to this, but the newspaper world has been abuzz about an actual fight that broke out in The Washington Post’s newsroom a few days ago. The subject was a “charticle,” a kind of hybrid story/graphic (and we’ll leave the merits of that genre for another day) that two reporters had put together for the Post’s Style section. The Style editor, Henry Allen, told the reporters it sucked. Actually, according to one source, he called it the “second-worst piece I’ve ever had handed to me in 43 years.” (What was the worst? Patience, dear reader; we’ll get to that.)
One of the two reporters, Monica Hesse, asked for the piece back so that it could be reworked. The other, Manuel Roig-Franzia, apparently said, “Oh, Henry, don’t be such a [rude name for a serial performer of a sexual act that was illegal in many states, including North Carolina, until a recent Supreme Court decision].” Whereupon Allen hit Roig-Franzia in the face and it was on, briefly, until Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli and others separated the two.
A number of bloggers have had things to say about this episode, but so far the best take I’ve seen was by the Post’s own Gene Weingarten:
The first thing I want to say is, hooray. Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. …
… if you’re a Henry Allen, or if you’re a Manuel Roig-Franzia, what is happening now [to the newspaper industry] hurts.
I don’t know the ultimate precipitating factor in what led to blows between these two guys on Friday — for all I know, Manuel strangled Henry’s cat. But I do know what I read, that the proximate cause was the quality of written word — what we put in the paper. It doesn’t surprise me. “What we put in the paper,” used to be a sacred term in most newsrooms, back before things began to change and some mediocre stuff began to appear with regularity. Back then, the meaning of “the paper” was completely different, too.
The news about the news, for the most part, has stunk for some time: There’s been cowardly and crappy decision-making in scary times; ethics, at times, have been mislaid; lousy things have found their way into print, and worthy things — killed for unworthy reasons — have not. I am not shocked that tempers boiled over, nor am I shocked that they boiled over between two people who know what has been happening, and care.
I hope Henry is invited and welcomed back to the newsroom; if anyone deserves a little slack, it’s him. I hope he and Manuel bury the hatchet. I hope neither of them loses one ounce of passion and I hope each of them remains privately convinced he was right.
Well, Weingarten can hope, but hope is not a plan. In fact, the Washingtonian blog post linked up top says this: “Brauchli called Allen into his office and closed the door. Allen’s contract is up later this month. Few Style writers expect to see him again.”
Weingarten explains well how such an incident is a natural, if not inevitable, byproduct of newsroom culture, at least up until a few years ago when the industry started making like the Titanic.
But you also need to know that running a newsroom can be a little bit like what I imagine running a kindergarten class is like: You’re responsible for a bunch of people with the maturity level of 5-year-olds who like to color outside the lines, people who may or may not work and play well with others on any given day, people who are, by and large, id embodied and very little else. As in kindergarten, at any given time there’s at least one person in the room who’s angry, bitter and disgruntled and may even have soiled his/her drawers. And as in kindergarten, newsroom disagreements are frequent and sometimes sharp, typically of short duration and usually forgotten by the next day.
In 25 years in newspapers, I had my share of sharp disagreements. I raised more than my share of voice more than my share of times. And yet only two incidents stand out in my memory, neither fully focused.
One involved a story I was writing with another reporter who wanted us to make a factual claim that might or might have been true but which was not supported by the data on which we were basing the story. As I recall, perhaps imperfectly, aspersions were loudly cast upon both my race (the story was about racial disparities in home-mortgage lending) and my intestinal fortitude.
The other, when I was an editor, involved a shouting match with a photographer who didn’t want to do a particular assignment I’d made or found the scheduling inconvenient or some such. Just the day before, I had written that same shooter’s editor a memo praising him for the quality of work he had done on a different assignment, so I was feeling betrayed as well as annoyed when I let loose on him with a diatribe that ended with the phrase of direct address, “you [copulating] ingrate!”
True to form, I had forgotten all about the incident by the next morning. But the rest of the newsroom, it seemed, was buzzing with the story when I came in to work. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would care until I heard the coda: Apparently, after our shouting match, my co-worker walked back into the photo lab and asked a colleague, “What’s an ingrate?”
Managing people like that in a culture like that is at least as much art as science, and while I’m grateful for the science part of the management training I’ve received over the years, both literal and metaphoric, I wonder whether the gradual encroachment of the science on the art hasn’t contributed in some small way to newspapers’ current woes. I always thought a good newspaper company should resemble most other professional businesses but that a newspaper newsroom should more closely resemble a scrappy, improvisatory rock ‘n’ roll band — sometimes sloppy, true, and not, shall we say, unfamiliar with failed experiments and improvisation gone horribly wrong, but also usually capable of great initiative, teamwork, creativity, passion, compassion, endurance and grace. A friend once asked me why I’d given up radio for journalism, and the first words out of my mouth were, “It’s rock ‘n’ roll by other means.” It sounded facile even then, and like most ex-newspaper people I’m capable of oversentimentalizing and over-romanticizing the job, but at the time and for years afterward, it was true, at least for me.
But whether Henry Allen stays or goes, both he and Roig-Franzia were fighting the wrong guy. And the real enemy is one they probably could never defeat.
* * *
So, if this story that Allen and Roig-Franzia fought over was the second-worst story Allen had seen in his 43 years in the bidness (or second-worst he’d ever seen at the Post’s Style section; accounts differ), what was the absolute worst? No one knows for sure. The Washingtonian solicited nominations. I’ve seen references to a piece on Paul Robeson that was so bad it never saw print. Weingarten has his own nomination, and after following his link to it and reading it, I’d say it’s definitely a contender.
Why? Well, editors don’t just edit stories. Good editors, anyway. They also edit ideas. And this was a story that begged to be killed at the idea stage, strangled in its crib, gutted with a fileting knife. the remains to be sauteed in butter, lemon, white wine and capers, then served with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
Because it’s been a while since I posted any, here’s a photo of a crocodile eating a shark:
Yeah, it’s entertaining as all hell. But even though Stewart insists he’s not a journalist and not trying to be a journalist, and even though this might even be true, the fact is that he and his show end up committing journalism — real, valuable journalism — from time to time.
The latest example has to do with journalist/author Jon Krakauer, who got a lot of publicity after saying Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, now commanding the U.S. military in Afghanistan, was involved in the cover-up of how NFL-star-turned-soldier Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire. Thing is, he said the same thing weeks ago on “The Daily Show.”
So, knowing how many journalists watch “The Daily Show,” how was this overlooked? And, also knowing how many journalists watch “The Daily Show,” does this mean people with something they think the American people ought to know are going to start trying to say it on Jon Stewart’s set?
Interesting times for journalism. Good thing I’m out of it.
MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who not only played a major role in getting us into this mess but also is allowing the banksters to screw us over while worsening the mess. His bill of particulars is long and damning. A taste:
… in the past 9 months, not only has the administration not fixed anything, they have made things much worse for anyone who isn’t a Wall Street banker. Therefore, we are past the point where anyone in power still gets the benefit of the doubt and the process of taking back our country for all citizens must begin now.
This is why I think we must ask if U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is still the right person for the job. It has become clear recently that back in his previous role as New York Federal Reserve Governor, he unnecessarily gave billions of dollars of US tax money to banks and insurance companies with few strings attached. And it is now becoming clear that his lack of meaningful action is helping many of these same banks steal more by legalizing their most economically dangerous, socially destructive and self-enriching practices.
Firing Geithner now would actually be doing him a favor, too, by providing him additional time to prepare his defense.
Relatedly, the banksters’ entitlement mentality is getting so overweening that even Bloomberg has been reduced to snark:
In fact, those Bloomberg customers [polled by the news organization] said any limits on pay will boomerang. Asked “Do you think limits on executive compensation in the financial industry will do more to control excessive risk-taking or more to discourage useful innovation?” 65 percent of the ones working in the U.S. said limits on pay would choke innovation.
Knowing what we do about innovation in finance, we wouldn’t want that to happen.
Also relatedly, don’t ask me how the Supreme Court we had in June could vote to give state officials more regulatory power over federally chartered banks. Just be glad they did, because some state attorneys general are going to sue them some crooked lenders. I’ve said on numerous occasions that there’s no way the mortgage bubble could have happened without widespread fraud, and if the feds aren’t going to crack the whip, I’m just happy somebody is.
… and I’d like to think this will entertain us, but if you’re like me, you’re probably just really annoyed:
The notorious presidential heckler, [Congressman]Joe “You lie” Wilson (R-SC), is blaming the manufacturing delay in producing adequate amounts of swine flu vaccine on President Obama. But in June, Wilson didn’t think preparation for the pending swine flu epidemic was important to Americans when he voted no on a special funding bill to combat the H1N1 virus.
At least swine flu is generally curable. Trying to cure Teh Stoopid, on the other hand, is like trying to cure clouds.
This was wrong when Bush did it, and it’s still wrong now that Obama is doing it:
The Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the “state secrets” privilege — which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) — to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government’s domestic surveillance activities. Obama did so again this past Friday — just six weeks after the DOJ announced voluntary new internal guidelines which, it insisted, would prevent abuses of the state secrets privilege. Instead — as predicted — the DOJ continues to embrace the very same “state secrets” theories of the Bush administration — which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned — and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law.
The case of Shubert v. Bush is one of several litigations challenging the legality of the NSA program, of which the Electronic Frontier Foundation is lead coordinating counsel. The Shubert plaintiffs are numerous American citizens suing individual Bush officials, alleging that the Bush administration instituted a massive “dragnet” surveillance program whereby “the NSA intercepted (and continues to intercept) millions of phone calls and emails of ordinary Americans, with no connection to Al Qaeda, terrorism, or any foreign government” and that “the program monitors millions of calls and emails . . . entirely in the United States . . . without a warrant” (page 4). The lawsuit’s central allegation is that the officials responsible for this program violated the Fourth Amendment and FISA and can be held accountable under the law for those illegal actions.
The “17-dimensional chess” theory holds that Obama is having his administration make these arguments hoping that they’ll lose in court, to create a legal precedent that would discourage future attempts to pull this kind of stunt. Me, I think he is, in all sincerity, getting, and taking, some extremely bad and illegal advice.
I recently read an essay — in the New Yorker, I think, although I can’t remember for sure — that argues that on the basis of what we now know about Martin Heidegger, his anti-Semitism is so virulent that it renders him an inappropriate subject for serious study.
Never having read any Heidegger, I’m agnostic on that question. But I have read Hannah Arendt, and so I was intrigued by this Ron Rosenbaum essay at Slate that, drawing on a Bernard Wasserstein essay in the Oct. 9 London Times Literary Supplement (not available online), suggests Arendt may have absorbed a little too much of the anti-Semitism she studied, with the result that she too often blamed the victim. It’s been years since I read Arendt, but I don’t recall getting that impression. Perhaps it just went over my head. Anyway, Rosenbaum maintains that Arendt’s best-known contribution to the subject, the concept of “the banality of evil” (i.e., they, too, were evil who only pushed pencils in the offices of the Nazi bureaucracy) gets it pretty much exactly backward: evil is evil, he says, and we must be on the watch for the evil of banality. Or something like that:
To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It’s a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism. Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied—as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution—the phrase was utterly fraudulent.
Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn’t know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.
Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, “radical evil.” Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it. Certainly one with more validity than banality.
Rosenbaum argues that Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil is itself evil because it lets us off the hook:
Arendt may not have intended that the phrase be used this way, but one of its pernicious effects has been to make it seem as though the search for an explanation of the mystery of evil done by “ordinary men” is over.
Maybe Rosenbaum is right, but I never understood the phrase that way. I understood it as more of a warning that opportunities to commit evil could appear among the banal choices and duties of everyday life and that we must always be wary. I never thought that she thought she had the answer as to how or why this happened. (For that, we must turn to Stanley Milgram and others.)
And the warning is valuable in and of itself. In the past few years, we have seen literally life-and-death decisions about our captives reduced to games of legal and constitutional three-card monte.
For the sake of discussion let’s grant Rosenbaum his argument that Arendt was too close to Heidegger, that she allowed herself to be unduly influenced by both Heidegger and some of her own anti-Semitic sources, that almost to the end of her life she believed in some of the same Germanic notions that gave rise to Hitlerism. The idea that not all monsters have horns and tails is still worth keeping constantly in mind.
Quote of the Day, from Balloon Juice commenter Davis X. Machina: “The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of [whom] will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
Please join me in wishing a happy birthday to a great American, a frequent Blog on the Run: Reloaded commenter and my friend and neighbor, Fred Gregory!
My review is up at Amazon. The short version: I liked it.
Using temperature data including that relied upon by skeptics of global warming, statisticians consulted by the AP confirmed that, “Superfreakonomics” notwithstanding, the globe is not cooling. (I’d've thought the disappearing polar ice cap would’ve been proof enough of that, but I’m an English major.)
How Goldman Sachs secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash, profited from doing so and likely will escape any consequences. Depressing but, at this point, hardly surprising.
Michael Klare at Salon.com: “No one seems to be saying this out loud — yet — but let’s put it bluntly: less than a year into the 15-year span of “Global Trends 2025,” the days of America’s unquestioned global dominance have come to an end.”
I don’t think we’re there yet. But like the CIA, although probably for different reasons, I think that, as a result of a number of disastrous decisions — both choices made and choices avoided — during the past 35 years, the road there is now one-way.
… and, oh, baby, does Alex Pereene give him one:
We all know that Vinegar Joe Lieberman is a sanctimonious, thin-skinned, self-satisfied monster. And a pious, amoral scumbag. And a narcissistic, deluded underminer who represents everything that is wrong with the United States Senate. And a war-mongering, concern-trolling religious zealot. And, generally, a bastard. And probably a racist. But why would this weasel-human hybrid who is actually literally slowly receding into his own [rectum] a little bit every day suddenly pipe up on health care reform with a position at odds with most Connecticut residents and a vast majority of the Democrats he claims to represent?
Because no one had been paying attention to him! (And also because he is owned by the various insurance companies of Connecticut. Like he is literally Aetna’s personal offensive Jeff Dunham puppet. Well, they have to share him with AIPAC.)
This is the thing, Joe. The opt-out public option is a conservative compromise. It is a compromise from a non-opt-out public option, which is a compromise from a non-opt-out public option tied to Medicare rates, which is a compromise from a non-opt-out public option tied to Medicare rates and open to everyone, which is a compromise from single-payer. You would like a further compromise, to “no health care reform, at all, unless the Democrats all kneel down and [service] me, as I will demand they do whenever they might need my vote, from now until I finally decide to caucus with the Republicans, which will only happen if the Republicans take the majority and the Democrats stop [servicing] me periodically.”
And, obviously, his literal, stated objections to the bill are not based in any way on reality.
Also, Matt Yglesias points out, Joe Lieberman can’t do math and neither can the reporters covering him:
It’s also worth emphasizing that while only the House-style public option will save a lot of money, even the relatively weak public option from the Reid draft would save money relative to doing what Lieberman wants. He’s talking about filibustering a deficit-reducing bill in order to try to remove a cost-reducing provision, and doing so on grounds of fiscal probity. It’s ludicrous, and the political reporters covering him need to point this out.
I would say that’ll leave a mark, but as we saw again last night, it’s difficult to leave a mark on the undead.
(h/t: HuffPo)
Take my money. Please:
One of the side effects of the TBTF [Too Big to Fail] policy is that it is essentially a subsidy of the mega banks at the expense of the smaller, regional ones, as the cost of capital of anyone perceived Too Big To Fail will approach zero due to their implicit guarantee by the US government in perpetuity: an unfortunate side effect of moral hazard becoming a national doctrine. An analysis by the Center For Economic and Policy Research has quantified the funding differential as one of 49 basis points, which translates into a bank subsidy of $34.1 billion per year for all banks with more than $100 billion in assets.
Comparing this thus quantified subsidy to other controversial programs as Foreign Aid Appropriations for 2009, indicates that the TBTF subsidy is 20% higher, and TBTF is more than double the projected budget allocated for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).
What is more relevant for shareholders of these banks, is that the subsidy, when represented as a fraction of bank profits, accounts for nearly 50% of all bank profits. And as profits are a function almost exclusively of banker comp as the only substantial banking overhead (consisting of base and bonus) the sad conclusion is that the government directly is funding at least half the bonus pool for all the TBTF institutions.
It is probably not too surprising that a high case estimate of the TBTF (which at the end of the day will likely prove too low anyway), accounts for 12.8% of profits at Goldman, 41.4% at JPM, 91.9% at Regions Financial, and a whopping 166.1% of Capital One’s “profits.“
As the CEPR paper authors Dean Baker and Travis McArthur point out:
[T]he recent rise in the profitability of the TBTF banks may be attributable to the fact that they enjoy the protection of the government’s backing at a time when the banking system as a whole continues to experience substantial strains. This should concern policymakers, since it would imply that a substantial portion of the profits of the largest banks is essentially a redistribution from taxpayers to the banks, rather than the outcome of market transactions. It is not clear that Congress and the public would support this redistribution if they realized that it was taking place.
So the next time there is public outcry at bonuses at Goldman Sachs, the general public should instead turn their anger to liars such as Tim Geithner who claim to want the right thing, but in actuality are merely trying to not only perpetuate the TBTF system and in doing so make it much more acute, but to also make sure that Wall Street extracts its pound of flash this bonus season, probably for the last time before the GDP collapse resumes its downward path absent Obama Stimuli 2 through infinity, and this time takes the market with it. [emphasis in original -- Lex]
For the record, this is not change I can believe in. In fact, it’s not change. In fact, it’s unconstitutional, and I’m not clear on why someone with standing (i.e., any U.S. taxpayer) and legal skillz and/or money to hire them hasn’t challenged this already.
MORE: based on the most recent disclosure from the NYSE, Goldman is now trading at a more than 10:1 ratio of principal to agency (read gambling with taxpayer funds about 10 times more than it transacts on behalf of clients).
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