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Outrage of the week

Friday, February 8, 2008

This week the Attorney General of the United States declared that the law does not apply to members of the executive branch. He did it twice. First he told the Judiciary Committee that torture is legal as long as the Justice Department clears it in advance. By extension, anything is legal as long as the Justice Department clears it in advance. Then he told the committee that the Justice Department would take no action on contempt citations issued by Congress to executive branch officials who refuse to honor lawful Congressional subpoenas if the President directs them not to appear. The president, according to Mukasey, is the law. Read the testimony at the second link.

Outrageous, but not as outrageous as the fact that this testimony has been virtually ignored by the media. It is simply par for the course for the Bush Administration to announce that it has no obligation to follow the law. It is living by Nixon’s maxim that “if the president does it, it’s legal”. Somewhere in Hell, Nixon is turning green with envy.

The fact that this is being ignored in the media is outrageous, but not as outrageous as the fact that Congress has done, and will do, nothing about it. Our democracy is being stolen and Congress has done nothing but emit feeble clucks of disapproval.

Mukasey has so clearly violated his oath of office. He clearly lied at his confirmation hearings. He has made Shumer and Feinstein, who are primarily responsible for the fact that he was confirmed, look like fools. He should be impeached. In fact, the House should impeach a large number of these people, if for no other reason than to put an official seal of disapproval on their actions. The Senate will not convict, but there doesn’t need to be a trial in the Senate-the House can time the impeachments so they happen toward the end of the term and at the time that these criminals would leave office anyway. It wouldn’t be much, but at least it would put Congress on record.

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Something happening here

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

It has been much remarked in the blogosphere, though not so much in the mainstream media, that turnout among Democrats has been extra high this year. A case in point is our fair town of Groton, where the votes cast for the top candidates are as follows. (All figures courtesy of the Courant, Dems here, Forces of the Darkside here):

Obama: 1,403
Clinton: 1,285

McCain: 686
Romney: 405
Huckster: 112
Total R: 1203

Groton registered voters are historically split fairly evenly among Democrats, Independents and Republicans, with Democrats holding a slight registration edge over Republicans. However, Republican turnout is usually higher than Democratic turnout, which accounts for the fact that Republicans have dominated the Town Council time out of mind.

Yesterday, the losing candidate (Hillary) got more votes than the total votes cast for all the remaining Republican candidates. Amazingly, Groton Republican outdid the state as a whole. In Groton, their top three combined got about 93% of Clinton’s vote; statewide they got about 84%. (Figures here and here) (If we factor in the statewide Democratic registration edge, Clinton gets fewer votes than the three Republicans, but the total Democratic vote still indicates a turnout almost twice as high as Republican turnout). What does that tell us? I think it tells us that the pollsters should be adding another choice when they poll Republicans: None of the above. Republicans don’t like their choices. Independents must like those Republican choices even less. As I pointed out above, Democratic turnout in Groton usually lags Republican turnout , so we have to work hard to turnout voters. Republicans, particularly in the more affluent districts where they tend to congregate, usually turn themselves out (I suspect that with few exceptions, that is a trend that holds statewide). What if they don’t this year? Where are the foot soldiers going to come from to turn them out? I have a feeling the party stalwarts are as uninspired as the Republican masses, and, at least here in Groton, I’m not sure that after all these years of phoning it in (comparatively) that the Republicans would know how to do it if they wanted to.

By comparison, Democrats, and I suspect a lot of Independents, are ready to vote for either of our candidates (or a yellow dog for that matter) to get rid of Bush and the horse he rode in on. The Republicans will roll out the slime machine, but people are so disgusted with the present government that it may not work this time, particularly because we’ll be deep in recession by the time November rolls around. Democrats here and everywhere are going to be working hard to get people to the polls, and this year, unlike any other, they are going to find their job a lot easier.

As long as we don’t form a circular firing squad we should do fine. It won’t hurt if the Republicans form one of their own.

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The Day Loves them some McCain

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

You had to go beneath the fold of this morning’s Day to see a mention of a Democrat. The headline was all Rs, and the meanest, biggest, bestest R of them all was big John McCain, the maverick Republican from Arizona.Y ou know, he’s such a maverick that he complains a little before doing what he’s told. A picture of him and his trophy wife took up more real estate on the Day’s front page then all of the articles (pictures and text) about the Democrats.

John McCain would be DOA as a presidential candidate would it not be for one thing: the determination of the press corps to prop him up. Just as with Bush, circa 2000, the press will resist reporting on the true John McCain, while blithely reinforcing Republican talking points about whatever candidate we finally nominate. Luckily, the Dems, or at least some of them, are ready to push back, including Howard Dean, who is already beginning the attack. It’s going to take some doing, for as lapdog Chris Matthews has said: “ The press loves McCain. We’re his base, I think“.

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Reminder: Drinking Liberally Thursday night

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Light blogging tonight. I am watching/listening to the returns on Brave New Films, where they do the heavy lifting of watching CNN for me, report the results, and reinforce all my preconceptions. What more could you ask?

Now’s a good time to remind everyone that Thursday night is the second meeting of the Southeastern Connecticut (nascent) chapter of Drinking Liberally. We’ll certainly have plenty to talk about. If we have a clear winner by then those who backed the winning candidate can lift a glass in celebration, while those who backed the loser can briefly drown their sorrows, before we all come together behind our candidate, whoever he or she may be. For we must remember, to paraphrase our founding Democrat, “We are all Clintonites; We are all Obama-ites”. And, in the event there’s still no clear winner, we can engage in fruitless speculative debate about what will happen next.

Time: 6:30, Place: Bulkeley House, Bank Street, New London. Easy parking in the back.

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Pictures from the Obama rally

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Good Morning, Democrats. Time to be the Deciders. A timely reminder in this morning’s comics:

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Guess which party’s primary they’re voting in?

Actually, the main point of this hurried post is to put up some pictures of the Obama rally that Betsy Moukawsher sent me last night. Betsy was up close, but to the rear.

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The pundit speaks

Monday, February 4, 2008

As an amateur pundit I cannot aspire to the lack of prescience endemic in the professional punditocracy. But that doesn’t mean I can’t inflict my prognostications on a helpless public. At least in my case, I’m not inflicting myself on a million living rooms.

Anyway, here’s my take on tomorrow. I am predicting that Obama will exceed expectations, at least as reflected in the polls. My thinking is fairly simple. I’m fairly sure there are a lot of people out there like me and my wife who have been wavering between Clinton and Obama. So, not only are there a lot of folks out there who call themselves undecided, but also a lot that could switch. I’m guessing that the undecided and the waverers break in a large proportion for Obama. I’m not saying that he will necessarily get more votes than Hillary, but I am saying he will get a lot more than the polls are showing.

Maybe I’m projecting, because despite some issues I have with him, I’m leaning toward Obama at the moment. But I think that a lot of people are looking for a break with the past, and for better or worse, Hillary is part of that past. I think Bill Clinton was a good president; I think Hillary would be a good president; but I don’t want to go through another eight years of having to deal with rabid Clinton haters, and frankly, I relish the idea of getting out of the dynastic cycle into which we have blundered. There are almost 300 million people in this country and there’s no reason the president must be named Bush or Clinton.

Now, I know that legions of Obama haters could arise, but it’s not a dead certainty, and he may be positioned to blunt a lot of the worst of it. This country needs inspiration and it is not going to get that from Hillary. And I say this fully cognizant of the fact that inspiring leadership is not always great leadership. I was 13 when JFK was killed. He was my hero for years, but I now know that, while he was indeed inspiring, he was not terribly effective. It is debatable whether he could have gotten the Civil Rights Act through the Congress, not to mention the Voting Rights Act. The uninspiring LBJ did that, helped, to be sure by the wave of support for JFK’s policies created by JFK’s death. When Hillary pointed out that it took an LBJ to get those acts through Congress, she was right. Remember, in today’s political world, Barack is not Martin Luther King. He’s JFK.

But these are not the 60s, and Barack is not really JFK, and the political realities with which we must deal are not the same as then. In any event, to a great extent, tomorrow is not about what people need, but what they want. They want someone to make them feel that this can be a great country again, and we can be a great and good people, and Hillary can’t give them that.

So that’s my prediction. If I’m right, I’m a genius. If I’m wrong, well like the professional pundits I will pretend I never wrote or thought any of the above, and next week I’ll be telling you that I knew Hillary would get the undecideds and late switchers all along.

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Round to Krugman

Monday, February 4, 2008

My mind is at war with itself. What to do when Paul Krugman and Dean Baker disagree? These are guys that normally know what they’re talking about. In this case the specific area of disagreement is about Obama’s health care plan. Unlike Hillary, it does not mandate that you purchase health insurance, but it does provide for a penalty if you choose to enter a plan after you have lived out your young, healthy years.

Krugman says:

An Obama-type plan would also face the problem of healthy people who decide to take their chances or don’t sign up until they develop medical problems, thereby raising premiums for everyone else. Mr. Obama, contradicting his earlier assertions that affordability is the only bar to coverage, is now talking about penalizing those who delay signing up — but it’s not clear how this would work.

Baker’s not exactly clear how it would work, either, but he seems to feel it could work:

[Obama] has suggested that we can have a system of default enrollment, whereby people are signed up for a plan at their workplace.

People would then have the option to say that they do not want insurance, so they are not being forced to buy it. However, they will then face a late enrollment penalty if they try to play the “healthy person” game. When they do opt to join the system, at some future point, they will have to pay 50 percent more for their insurance, or some comparable penalty for trying to game the system.

A system of default enrollment will ensure that people do not remain uninsured due to inertia. A system of late enrollment penalties will ensure that people don’t try to game the system.

I think Krugman, and by extension, Hillary, wins on this one. Suppose, for instance, I decide at the age of 20, secure in the knowledge that I will live and stay young forever, to forego insurance. Suppose further that at the age of 40 I suddenly realize that I am not an exception to the rule and that I am, in fact, going to grow old. Believe it or not, this is not an uncommon scenario. I have gone 20 years without paying insurance premiums. If I choose to get insurance now, by all rights my penalty should be equivalent to about 20 years of premiums. If it is appreciably lower than that, then I am still gaming the system But unless I’m very rich I will probably not have that kind of ready cash around. So I will either (along with my also aging peers) make a demand through the political system to let me in without paying, or go without insurance because I can’t afford it. Either way, the system is undermined.

Of course, the fact is that a single payer system makes the most sense, but they have both apparently concluded that the choice favored by a vast majority of American citizens is politically impossible to attain.

On a related point, when the cost of health care came up in the recent debate, why did neither candidate 1) point out that their systems could be fully funded by transferring the money we are spending in Iraq (with enough left over to educate most of our kids), or that we are already inefficiently funding a health system, and that if you want to use meaningful numbers you have to factor in the amounts saved to other parts of the economy. For instance, if GM is no longer paying $1,500.00 a car for health care, then that has to come off the overall cost. Efficiency saves money, and the cost of health care is coming out of our collective pockets whether it’s paid in taxes or in bloated premiums to insurance companies.

Update: Krugman response to Baker here.

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From the Onion

Sunday, February 3, 2008

I automatically download Onion video podcasts on Itunes. This is beyond doubt the funniest I’ve seen:

In The Know: Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough?

Be warned, 30 second commercial at the end, but you can just stop it.

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Your point being?

Saturday, February 2, 2008

I read this article in this morning’s Day (Killer had been living in Hartford) from beginning to end this morning, my puzzlement mounting. The thrust of it is that a person was convicted of murder here in Connecticut, served his sentence, was released, successfully completed a term of probation (five years), and then legally moved to New Hampshire.

Why is this news?

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Original artwork

Saturday, February 2, 2008

When I read this morning’s Zippy, I thought it would be a good one to add to my wife’s collection of bath oriented comics (including another one of Zippy) and pictures that she has-guess where? That’s right, in the bathroom. Here’s today’s comic:

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She didn’t remember even having an old Zippy in there, but I did, and here it is:

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There seems to be more than a superficial resemblance between the two. I can totally relate to this sort of thing. There are days when I feel like I’m recycling old blog posts, so why not recyle old artwork, especially because the trenchant yet meaningless political comment is entirely original.

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