November 2008 Archives

Andrew Sullivan is correct: we should condemn the Associated Press for equivocating on whether waterboarding is torture.

It is. And, as I've discussed earlier, it has been acknowledged as such by tyrants and despots since the 17th Century.

As Sullivan writes:

So why cannot the AP tell the truth?

An excellent question.

Big. Really big. Bigger than the inflation-adjusted cost of World War II big. Barry Ritholtz has the details.

I am stunned that I live in a state where a termed-out State Senator could argue during a debate about our state budget crisis last night that short restorations in the vehicle license fee to its 50-year-old rate of 2.00 percent were to blame for the last two revenue crashes this state faced, rather than the collapse of the technology bubble and the post-September 11 economic climate.

I understand well the need to stick to talking points...but really?

Another note: to those Republicans who compared the California state budget process to the federal state budget process, I would like to see the printing presses you've found that will allow California to print its own currency and the changes to our state Constitution allowing deficits to be run at the sole decision of the Legislature and Governor.

Don't worry. I have time...

This must have been quite a meeting.

Andrew Sullivan writes an extremely important post about our nation's use of torture -- and how we should not try to hide behind euphemisms like "under coercive conditions."

"Under coercive conditions". Excuse me, but what does that mean in English? Try: Because they got intelligence from torturing people. Coercion means force. It means they forced "information" out of them. Not coax, trick, lure, force. That means the victims had no choice. And the only way in which human beings can seriously have no choice at all is by subjecting them to such severe mental and physical pain and suffering that they have no option as human beings but to tell their torturers something.

Sullivan then does the vital job of explaining what was done in our name since September 11, 2001:

Even the word "torture" can be too vague and abstract a term. So let us state in plain English how Bush, Cheney, Tenet, et al. actually got information. They did it by subjecting prisoners to repeated drowning, or freezing, or heating, or sadistically long sleeplessness, or shackling or crucifying them until the pain could be borne no longer, or beating them until they pleaded for mercy, or threatening to kill or torture their children or wife or parents. Or all of the above in combination, in isolation, and with no surety of ever seeing the light of day again, with no right to meaningful due process of any kind, sometimes sealed off from light and sound for months at a time, or bombarded with indescribable noise day and night in cells from which there was no escape ever. This is what "under coercive conditions" actually means. It drove many of the victims into become mumbling, shaking, insane shells of human beings; it killed dozens; it drove others still to hunger strikes to try to kill themselves; and it terrified and scarred and "broke" the souls of many, many others. For what? Intelligence that cannot be trusted, and the loss of the sacred integrity of two centuries of American history. Did it save lives? We do not know. We do know that the people who are claiming it did have been unable to bring any serious case to justice based on their original claims, and are the people who are criminally responsible for the torture they have committed. Why would they not say it saved lives? And yet we have no other way to know. And we have the terrifying possibility that false information procured by torture provided a pretext to torture others in a self-perpetuating loop in which any ability to find out the actual truth is lost for ever. That, after all, is how some of the flawed intelligence that took us into Iraq was procured.

To paraphrase Hitch: torture poisons everything.

We must have an accounting. The truth of this must be told. Our national honor has been dirtied -- if not destroyed -- because of our nation's use of torture.

Those who broke George Washington's prohibition should not be allowed to go onto the lecture and book-selling circuit without consequence.

Yes, the economy is important.

But our national honor is also important. And nations need to be able to do more than one thing at a time.

In Fortune, author Michael Lewis returns to the place that gave him his first best-seller: Wall Street to describe the end of the Wall Street boom he chronicled in Liars Poker.

The article is a quick explanation of how we got into the economic abyss we now face -- and you will leave it wondering why we didn't see it coming.

This is an important story because people take reported anthrax attacks seriously, even as those who claim the United States has not been attacked since September 11 have suffered an outrageous case of historical amnesia:

There has not been a real anthrax attack in the United States since the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people, sickened 17 others and shut down Congress.

But Marc Keyser still worries about the state of the nation's emergency preparedness, as well as Osama bin Laden's plans to continue attacking the nation.

"This nation's got to deal with reality," Keyser said this week during an interview in his small Sacramento apartment.

Keyser, it should be noted, is the 66-year-old former teacher indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury for allegedly mailing out 120 letters nationwide containing packets of sugar marked "anthrax." The packets were accompanied by CD copies of his book, "Anthrax Shock and Awe Terror," which notes on the cover that "America has never been in such graver (sic) danger."

It is not the first time he has been accused of a hoax anthrax mailing, and he doesn't deny he did it.

"Nothing was meant to happen," said Keyser, who faces 10 counts of hoax mailings and three counts of mailing threatening communications. "It was a warning of the dangers we face."

Keyser, who is free on $25,000 bail, faces up to 70 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

The New York Times' Christina Capecchi offers this epic fail attempt to describe the state of the Minnesota U.S. Senate race.

Media Matters' County Fair blog describes the journalistic atrocities:

We noted earlier the several blotches that appeared in the Friday Times article about the Al Franken/Norm Coleman recount. We didn't' like the way the article was heavily favored in terms of quoting and referencing Coleman supporters, and how the Times gave a platform to the GOP claim (completely unsubstantiated) that the race was being "stolen." And how the newspaper even quoted Sean Hannity, as if his propaganda had any relevance in the recount.

Now we find out that a person quoted in the Times piece and presented as sort of an Everyman Minnesota voter (who, by the way, came down on the side of Coleman), actually has close ties to the GOP. Worse, the Everyman voter says he explained his GOP connection to the Times reporter and that even the Everyman voter was surprised when his GOP ties were not mentioned in the Times article.

Fair and balanced.

He tries to say this was a "joke." Politico's Mike Allen and Andy Barr have the details:

A roomful of academics erupted in angry boos Tuesday morning after political analyst Michael Barone said journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans' vice presidential nominee, because "she did not abort her Down syndrome baby."

Barone said in an e-mail that he "was attempting to be humorous and ... went over the line."

Barone was speaking at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, to the 121st annual meeting of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, which calls itself the nation’s oldest higher-education association.

“The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby," Barone said, according to accounts by attendees. "They wanted her to kill that child. ... I'm talking about my media colleagues with whom I've worked for 35 years.”

Barone, a popular speaker on the paid lecture circuit, is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and principal coauthor of “The Almanac of American Politics."

About 500 people were in the room, and some walked out.

Only some?

In a world that includes Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter, there is little a right-wing pundit can say or do to disqualify them from respectable political discourse.

Here is a man who slandered many of his colleagues and then tries to excuse himself by claiming he was telling a joke involving abortion. In a decent world, Barone would be shunned.

Update: And Atrios is right to name him "Wanker of the Day."

That's E.J. Dionne's advice for President-Elect Barack Obama.

The worst advice will come from his conservative adversaries, the people who called him a socialist a few days before the election and insisted a few days later that he won because he was really a conservative. The older among them declared after the 1980 election that the 51 percent of the vote won by Ronald Reagan represented an ideological revolution, but argue now that Obama's somewhat larger majority has no philosophical implications.

These conservatives are trying to stop Obama from pursuing any of the ideas that he campaigned on -- universal access to health care, a government-led green revolution, redistributive tax policies, a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, more robust economic regulation.

Their gimmick is to insist that the United States is still a "center-right" country because more Americans call themselves conservative than liberal. What this analysis ignores is that Americans have clearly moved to the left of where they were four, eight or ten years ago.

The public's desire for more government action to heal the economy and guarantee health insurance coverage, along with its new skepticism about the deregulation of business, suggests that we are a moderate country that now leans slightly and warily left.

Eric Alterman compiled, for his outstanding book Why We're Liberals, a long list of polling data that shows Americans siding with the liberal position on issue after issue.

Democrats have won two straight decisive elections. The American people support liberal positions. It is time they governed like it.

It's, um, big. As Atrios writes:

...but even at the height of the Great And Glorious Republican Revolution, back when Democrats were doomed to irrelevancy for generations, they maxed out at just 232 House seats. Dems have about 256 at the moment, with a couple of races not yet decided.

This is not a small majority. It is not weak. It is time to get some business done.

FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver gets the New York Times profile treatment after proving that the use of actual mathematics can lead to incredibly solid presidential analysis.

Happy Veterans Day.

I hope the new year will bring better programs and more support for the issues our Veterans face after their brave duty on our behalf.

Paul Krugman looks back at FDR's economic legacy and has some advice for the incoming Obama administration:

And F.D.R. wasn’t just reluctant to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion — he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back into double digits and led to a major defeat in the 1938 midterm elections.

What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.

This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.

The political lesson is that economic missteps can quickly undermine an electoral mandate. Democrats won big last week — but they won even bigger in 1936, only to see their gains evaporate after the recession of 1937-38. Americans don’t expect instant economic results from the incoming administration, but they do expect results, and Democrats’ euphoria will be short-lived if they don’t deliver an economic recovery.

The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

This makes good sense to me -- and I have spent a good part of my life arguing for balanced budgets.

Of course, one of the reasons we should have balanced budgets and run surpluses during good times (instead of cutting taxes at every opportunity) is so the government can provide a fiscal stimulus by going from surplus to minor deficits.

Alas, the surpluses we had under Clinton were squandered on tax cuts for the richest among us and a war that did not address the September 11 attacks.

So, the perfect is not possible. In this case, I have to come down on the side of saving the economy. This is not the time to be a deficit hawk -- this is the time to save the economy.

Outgoing DNC Chair Howard Dean deserves great credit for arguing the need to fight in all 50 states -- despite severe criticism from those who felt the Democrats should keep trying to lose national elections.

The conversation between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Himself) about the latter's status in the Democratic caucus should not be a long one.

Reid should be gracious. Offer the independent the opportunity to keep his seniority and a minor subcommittee chairmanship. But he loses his full committee chairmanship.

Lieberman is fond of giving lectures about personal responsibility. Well, Senator, your decisions have consequences. You attacked the Democratic presidential nominee after you promised not to do so -- a person, moreover, who came to your aid in your last Senatorial election.

If you want to caucus with the Republicans, don't let the door hit you on your behind on the way out.

This is not a negotiation, Senator. This is an accountability moment. You insist on them for others -- now it is time for you to have one yourself.

Good bye, Senator.

Josh Marshall notes that the Obama transition web site at change.gov includes a chart showing the president subservient to the Constitution and the Vice President as part of the Executive Branch.

I hope our nation is prepared for such changes...

For people interested in learning something about Chief of Staff-Designate Rahm Emanuel, this Joshua Green profile in the October 20, 2005 Rolling Stone is a nice place to start.

Wow. The effort to derail Gov. Sarah Palin's political career began even more quickly than I thought it would -- the day after the election.

Here's a conversation on Fox News Channel between Shepard Smith and correspondent Carl Cameron. According to Cameron, Gov. Palin would not prepare for interviews, did not know the countries in NAFTA free-trade agreement (the U.S., Canada, and Mexico), and did not understand that Africa was a continent and not a country.

My wife makes a great point about this report: if any of this is true, how was it not a story before the campaign -- off-the-record or not? The fact that a campaign talking about "Country First" and "executive experience" was facing these kinds of issues is important. After all, that campaign attempted to put Palin one heartbeat away from the presidency.

And, let me make clear, this is not just a criticism of Fox News Channel. Many other media outlets are running these retrospectives with reporters embedded on the condition that their reporting was to remain secret until after the election.

Now I know our media members love access, but their job should be to REPORT NEWS when it happens, not keep access until it does not really matter after the elections.

Update: Matthew Yglesias reports that right wing blogs are making a list of everyone saying negative things about Gov. Sarah Palin now, so they (and any candidates that hire them) can be attacked in 2012.

I didn't want to post this on my personal blog until now because I was afraid of jinxing things. (Really.) For those of you who live in the Bay Area...

The Lamorinda Democratic Club invites all Lamorindans to an outdoor celebration on Wednesday, November 5th to commemorate this year’s historic elections. Enjoy lively music and refreshments with your fellow Lamorindans from 6:00-8:00 pm in Lafayette Plaza Park (corner of Mt. Diablo Boulevard and Moraga Road). Local officials and state representatives will share their thoughts about this historic election. Bring your family, friends and neighbors and celebrate! Click here for the event flyer.

(Yes, that's me. Hence the "jinxing" fears.)

Drop by if you are in the Lafayette area!

On CNN. Where they could not remember that the last president to have a Congress controlled by his own party was...

um...

George W. Bush. The guy currently in the White House.

Shouldn't a producer be screaming in their ears at this stupidity?

Sometime before January 20, 2009, leading Republican Party leaders are going to rediscover their severe concern and outrage about Executive Branch abuses of power.

I cannot imagine why they would suddenly change their minds on this important issue.

Could someone at NBC please brief Tom Brokaw about this fact? Geez.

(Hat tip: Matthew Yglesias)

I woke up to some emails asking me about my electoral college vote prediction (Obama 338, McCain 200) below. What does it mean?

Basically, I've gone with the worst I think Obama can do tonight. This is, overall, a non-aggressive prediction. I think Obama is going to come close in some red states, but not quite win. This I've signaled with my prediction that North Carolina goes for McCain.

If Obama wins North Carolina -- and those early voting numbers make Obama really competitive or even win Georgia -- then this is a landslide in the making. If McCain makes Virginia, Pennsylvania, or Florida close, then this election will be decided late.

In other races:

I'm predicting the Democrats have 58 Senate seats (56 Democrats, plus Senators Lieberman and Sanders as independents caucusing with them). I think Al Franke. n comes up just short in Minnesota. I also think Georgia's Senate seat is going to go to a run-off -- which will happen if no one finishes with 50 percent or more of the vote. I have the currently Republican Senate seats in Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia switching to the Democratic column. I have Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell barely surviving.

In the House, I'm predicting the Democrats pick up 27 seats.

Here's mine: Barack Obama 338, John McCain 200.

Now, please, please, please...make sure you vote!

Rachel Maddow is right: 3-5 hour lines to vote, or longer, constitute a new poll tax. Our time waiting in line is a cost -- a significant one. Such lines are a new form of disenfranchisement -- and we must not tolerate them.

In the 21st Century, there is simply no excuse for multi-hour wait lines to vote. It's been eight years since the broken 2000 presidential election. Can we please actually try to fix our voting systems now?

One of the most interesting trips of my political life was the one I took with my colleagues to bring the National Debt Clock to Dixville Notch, N.H., for voting during the 1996 presidential primaries.

Dixville Notch has a tradition of voting right after midnight on election day. The polls in New Hampshire can close if 100 percent of eligible voters have cast ballots. It was truly something to watch the process in person -- and see the polls close early. One friend was smart enough to hold one of our Concord Coalition bumper stickers in his hand afterwards -- giving the C-SPAN camera something on which to focus as the discussed the results.

Dixville Notch most often votes Republican. But tonight the results are blue: Barack Obama wins 15-6.

Will the early lead hold up?

Ezra Klein is unimpressed with CNN's decision to hire as an analyst the author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. As Klein notes, Stephen Hayes has quite a record:

the guy who thought we had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we had found operational links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, but the Bush administration refused to tell you about it?

Nice work, CNN. Another example of your so-called liberal media at work.

Here's another classy move by a political party that should be spending more time trying not to get crushed in California tomorrow.

Classy, filing this complaint about Barack Obama's trip to Hawaii to visit his grandmother -- on the day she dies.

Good work. That'll win a bunch of votes.

The thing that must struck me about Senator John McCain's appearance on Saturday Night Live was his willingness to take part in a skit that portrayed his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin, in such a negative light.

As James Fallows writes, if McCain thought he was going to win on Tuesday, there is no way he would have agreed to this skit.

We've already heard some McCain staffers begin to pin this loss on Palin, with those reports of her going rouge and being a whack-job.

But let's not forget that she is the one who is going to be a top rank fundraiser for conservative politicians and causes over the next four years. She is the future (at least for now). Palin has also proven to be quite politically saavy.

McCain may have gotten in an initial shot. But I suspect Palin is going to win this argument.

FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver has posted the most common scenarios where the McCain-Palin ticket to win in his election simulations.

What's important to watch on Tuesday? As Silver explains:

Also, there are some states that truly do appear to be "must-wins" for McCain. In each and every one of the 624 victory scenarios that the simulation found for him this afternoon, McCain won Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Indiana and Montana. He also picked up Ohio in 621 out of the 624 simulations, and North Carolina in 622 out of 624. If McCain drops any of those states, it's pretty much over.

As regular readers of this space know, I find the collective amnesia among our political and media leaders about the anthrax attacks of September and October 2001 extremely troubling and annoying.

Atrios finds Senator John McCain falling into this historical trap in a story about McCain offering warm words for President Bush as reported by Michael Cooper on the New York Times' The Caucus blog:

“I think that Tom Ridge — and President Bush — deserve some credit for the fact there’s not been another attack on the United States of America since 9/11,’’ he said.

As anyone who remembers the anthrax attacks must recognize, they deserve no such credit. The anthrax attacks, moreover, remain unsolved -- with serious problems with the government's current theory about how they happened.

No one is served by forgetting the anthrax attacks -- a terrorist strike that directly impacted millions of people. Remember getting plastic gloves to open business mail everyone?

It is well past time to remember what actually happened.

Via the indispensable fivethirtyeight.com, a photo of a Republican Party headquarters in the Florida panhandle, just 72 hours from the close of the polls. Does this say something about the GOP's vaunted 72-hour turnout program?

The Christian Science Monitor has announced that its daily version will be available only on the web starting in 2009. It will print a weekly edition, but no longer print a daily one, focusing solely on constant updates on its web site.

CNN reports that at a rally featuring Gov. Sarah Palin in Florida, there were many Palin signs -- but none for the man at the top of the Republican ticket.

That 2012 campaign has started pretty early...

Steve Clemons over at the Washington Note examines the possibility that we will see a resurgence of piracy beyond the Somalia area.

My thesis, however, is not about Somalia, but rather about the likelihood of replication. I think this is likely a new generation of asymmetrical, economic warfare. The world has become too interconnected for piracy to remain isolated to the Gulf of Aden. Occasional acts of piracy have already been linked to Yemeni vessels, and global news coverage - exacerbated last month by the capture of a ship hauling 33 tanks - assures that knowledge of the effectiveness of the tactic will not remain unique to the horn of Africa.

I think famines fueled by climate change, along with water shortages towards the midcentury years, are likely to decrease the powers of poor central governments, most dangerously in African coastal states. Major shipping routes across the Maghreb and along the western African coast will be subject to the highest risks. Also, the Straits of Malacca -- which has been historically troubled by pirates -- and other routes through the South China Sea, will be at heightened risk if weak governments are incapable of adjusting to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Piracy is cheap, efficient and rewarding, and is likely to become a widely employed tactic unless deterred by host governments.

This is a problem I had not considered, but seemed quite obvious once I heard of it. This is a potential problem that could require a coordinated effort.