Absolute best Colbert ever last night. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama were all on. Even John McCain made a brief (taped) appearance, napping at the state of the Union. Here’s Barack:
Colbert’s a true patriot. How sick is this country when the most responsible journalists on television work for the Comedy Channel?
I’m a bit late to the feast, a function of my blogging schedule, but I might as well add my voice to the chorus of folks condemning ABC for the conduct of the “debate” last night.
Maybe it was a sixth sense, but I didn’t watch it in real time. I recorded it on my computer, cut out the ample commercials, and skimmed through it at around 10:45 last night. I find I can stomach these things better if I watch them after the fact. If I know I’m watching live I feel duty bound to scream, curse, and otherwise rail against the inanity. TV may be a cool medium, but not for me. After all, who’s to say that my screaming might not have some small effect. If I watch after the fact, I am more subdued, perhaps since nothing I can do can make the slightest difference. Even chaos theory would deny that one mouth flapping can affect events that occurred in the past.
By the time I started watching I some idea what to expect from the comments on the “live debate blogging” sites. It truly was a travesty. To me, the low point was when Hillary attempted to pile on Obama about William Ayers. If ever there was a manufactured controversy, that is it. What I find depressing is Hillary’s inability to understand that she could have served her cause better had she stood four square with Obama, and berated Stephanopoulos for spewing right wing talking points. She just can’t stop herself; she has become her own worst enemy.
Yesterday, my wife and I took a step we had been putting off for some time. We had intended to wait until the nominee was crystal clear, but we’ve seen enough. My “Cheney-Satan 08” bumper sticker came down, and my Obama 08 sticker went up. My wife doesn’t go in for snark, so she just added a bumper sticker where none had gone before. We’re fully committed now. I admire the guy tremendously. Had I had to answer such inane questions I could not have contained my fury. The contrast between him and the other folks on stage was stark.
Comedic highlight of the night: Charlie Gibson trying to convince Obama that the middle class was sorely threatened by any talk of a hike in the capital gains tax. You could see the panic in his face as he contemplated his increased tax bill. On a serious note, his claim that lowering the capital gains tax increases tax receipts is, as anyone with a brain could intuit, not well founded. As Dean Baker observes:
At last night’s Democratic debate, ABC’s co-anchor Charlie Gibson was intent on arguing with the Senators Clinton and Obama that a capital gains tax cut raises revenue. As others have pointed out, the evidence that a capital gains tax cut raises revenue is rather dubious, since most of the apparent increase is likely due to timing: investors delay selling stock when they know a tax cut is imminent. After the cut takes effect, they then declare their gains and pay taxes at the lower rate.
But this is only part of the story. As President Reagan noted when he signed the 1986 tax reform, taxing capital gains at a lower rate than other income gives people enormous incentive to game the tax code. If the tax rate on ordinary income for high-income taxpayers is 35 percent, and the tax rate on capital gains is 15 percent, then these folks can get a 20 percent return if they can make wage, interest, rent or dividend income appear as capital gains income. This can fuel a lot of creative tax shelters. This gap will also lead to an increase in capital gains tax collection – at the expense of ordinary income tax collections.
There is one other important point worth noting about the capital gains leads to more taxes story. Presumably the greater collections are supposed to come from people selling their stock or other assets more frequently. This means more fees for the financial industry, but is this what we really want to promote. The fees from these trades are a drain on people’s investments. There is a lot of research showing that active traders typically lose money. Is it good policy to promote more active trading (that is, if you don’t work on Wall Street)?
Condi does not condone torture. She can say this because, according to their lawyer and their Orwellian way of thinking, it’s only torture if they say it is, and they say it isn’t.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gqaw5UnHA4[/youtube]
Sign the Get Rid of Condi Petition here. Yes, I know it’s not going to happen, but that’s no excuse.
3 trillion dollars is the estimated cost of the Iraq war, an outlay that was totally avoidable and which could have been used for other purposes, or never borrowed in the first place.
Numbers that big make your brain go numb. They are literally incomprehensible. This site tries to make them somewhat comprehensible.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgq5suMXCV8[/youtube]
This blog seriously cuts into my reading time. My stack of Christmas books is only beginning to dwindle. I just finished Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal, which, of course, I heartily recommend. Unlike the Great Unraveling, it is not merely a collection of his columns.
Krugman appears to be a Hillary supporter, primarily, I think, because he feels her health care plan is superior to Obama’s, which it probably is, if only marginally. He believes, with a great deal of justification, that health care is the defining issue of our time: if we get it right, then we will get a chain reaction of other progressive legislation. From reading his column, it appears that the policy wonk in him triumphed over the political analyst, for to my mind, his book makes a better case for Obama than Hillary. In one of his final pages Krugman observes:
During the Clinton years there wasn’t a progressive movement … and the nation paid a price. Looking back, it’s clear that Bill Clinton never had a well-defined agenda. …There were many reasons Hillary Clinton’s health care plan failed, but a key weakness was that it wasn’t an attempt to give substance to the goals of a broad movement-it was a personal venture, developed in isolation and without a supporting coalition. [After the defeat] Bill Clinton was reduced to making marginal policy changes. He ran the government well, but he didn’t advance a larger agenda, and he didn’t build a movement. This could happen again, but if if it does, progressives will feel rightly betrayed.
Even without the proof positive of the last few days, it’s always been clear that Hillary Clinton is stuck in that 90s paradigm. Her husband governed from a defensive crouch through circumstances only partly of his own making. He could make the case against Republican excesses, but was not so good at making the case for a progressive agenda. In point of fact, he never tried. He bought into the DLC vision of the world. If you believe you can only govern by pandering to the right, or blurring your differences, you can never achieve anything beyond small, incremental changes. Hillary is cut from the same cloth and molded by the same experiences. She cannot build a movement. She doesn’t see that as being part of her brief.
It is by no means clear that Obama can do better than Hillary, but the candidate of hope is really our only hope on this score. We need an unapologetic advocate for a progressive vision. That is not Hillary. It may not be Obama, but it might be Obama. We can only hope.
Somewhat related footnote: Obama says he will go after the criminals in the present administration, should he be elected. I devoutly hope that is true. I’m confident that Clinton would take the position that we should put trivial stuff like abuse of power and torture behind us. In addition to indictments, we need a Truth Commission. Not a “bi-partisan” coverup commission, but a commission stacked with people motivated to turn over all the rocks and expose the criminality to the light of day. My vote for AG, by the way, goes to Patrick Fitzgerald.
The Dean of the School of Law at Berkeley defends his school for continuing to shelter John Yoo, who is a tenured professor at that now tainted institution. Some of his argument makes sense. There are issues of academic freedom involved, and if he just stuck to the position that he abhors John Yoo, but he’s stuck with him because he has tenure, then the piece might be unobjectionable. But he also says this, which I think reflects a profound misapprehension of the duties of a lawyer, the moral responsibility of lawyers, and the dynamics of the conspiracy of which Yoo was a part.
Here’s the quote:
As critical as I am of his analyses, no argument about what he did or didn’t facilitate, or about his special obligations as an attorney, makes his conduct morally equivalent to that of his nominal clients, Secretary Rumsfeld, et al., or comparable to the conduct of interrogators distant in time, rank and place. Yes, it does matter that Yoo was an adviser, but President Bush and his national security appointees were the deciders.
Here the good Dean seeks to draw a distinction between the enabler and the enabled. We must recall that Yoo was not attempting to defend a client who had already engaged in some reprehensible activity: he was trying to come up with a legalistic sounding formula to give that “client” a green light to commit crimes in the future. He was, in fact, part of a conspiracy to commit criminal acts: his role being to “launder” the criminal acts by giving them a fraudulent legal sanction. This was part and parcel of the plan, and he is as much a part of that conspiracy as Rumsfeld, who passed the word to his underlings that it was now alright to torture. His role was similar to that of Albert Speer, who, if I recall correctly, never personally gassed or tortured any Jews. He just designed the system that facilitated and enabled the folks on the ground to do those very things more efficiently.
There is a world of difference between giving a person charged with a criminal act the best defense you can (even if that means making morally suspect legal arguments, which will, after all, be passed on by a court) and advising someone, without the reasonable possibility that your advice will be reviewed by a judge, that it is okay to commit a crime.
I’m not sure what I would do about Yoo if I were the Dean at Berkeley, but I would, I hope, not try to distinguish his acts from those of his co-conspirators. Were there justice in this world, he would be standing before the bar as a defendant in a war crimes trial, right next to the “deciders”.
I thought I was done for the day, then I ran into this (via Pharyngula), and had to pass it on:
SANA’A, April 9 – An eight-year-old girl decided last week to go the Sana’a West Court to prosecute her father, who forced her to marry a 30-year-old man.
Nojoud Muhammed Nasser arrived at court by herself on Wednesday, April 2, looking for a judge to handle her case against her father, Muhammed Nasser, who forced her two months ago to marry Faez Ali Thamer, a man 22 years her senior. The child also asked for a divorce, accusing her husband of sexual and domestic abuse.
According to Yemeni law, Nojoud cannot prosecute, as she is underage. However, court judge Muhammed Al-Qathi heard her complaint and subsequently ordered the arrests of both her father and husband.
“My father beat me and told me that I must marry this man, and if I did not, I would be raped and no law and no sheikh in this country would help me. I refused but I couldn’t stop the marriage,” Nojoud Nasser told the Yemen Times. “I asked and begged my mother, father, and aunt to help me to get divorced. They answered, ‘We can do nothing. If you want you can go to court by yourself.’ So this is what I have done,” she said.
Nasser said that she was exposed to sexual abuse and domestic violence by her husband. “He used to do bad things to me, and I had no idea as to what a marriage is. I would run from one room to another in order to escape, but in the end he would catch me and beat me and then continued to do what he wanted. I cried so much but no one listened to me. One day I ran away from him and came to the court and talked to them.”
“Whenever I wanted to play in the yard he beat me and asked me to go to the bedroom with him. This lasted for two months,” added Nasser. “He was too tough with me, and whenever I asked him for mercy, he beat me and slapped me and then used me. I just want to have a respectful life and divorce him.”
As PZ Myers points out, it’s not just Mormons doing this sort of thing. At least the Yemenis stepped in to help the gutsy little girl. What’s depressing is that I find that fact surprising.
I am not a good enough writer to express the outrage I feel as Hillary Clinton attempts to insure a McCain victory in the fall. The Democrats are notoriously undisciplined, but no one has undermined a competitor in this fashion since Humphrey did a similar sort of number on McGovern in 1972. McGovern probably would have lost anyway, but it didn’t help that Humphrey painted him as a wild eyed radical who couldn’t be trusted to be president. What Hillary is doing is ever worse, because if Obama loses it will be in much greater part because of the groundwork laid by Hillary. Should she get the nomination, she is also guaranteeing her own defeat, because she is throwing away the support of committed Democrats, liberals, young people and blacks. All she’ll have left is embittered gun toting Bible readers, who will vote for McCain anyway.
So, since I’m not going to write about Hillary, I’ll content myself with explaining my absence yesterday. My wife and I went to Brooklyn to see my son, who is living there while he’s attending graduate school at NYU. We were happily surprised that our older son came up from Washington to join us. We went to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, both in sort of whirlwind fashion because of the time constraints we were under. A picture from the Gardens below. Anyone interested can see a lot more at the “Brooklyn” page, link on the upper right or you can click here.
wtfdnucsailor (who I assume is from Waterford) reports at Connecticut Local Politics that my friend Sean Sullivan has attacked Joe Courtney, who has been in Congress a little over a year, because we are not currently building two subs a year in Groton. As the sailor from Waterford points out:
I am not sure what Candidate Sullivan is referring to. Unfortunately, you cannot start building two submarines a year immediately, even if you wanted to. Congressman Courtney successfully got $588 million in the current budget that included lead time funds for a second submarine starting in 2011, vice the 2012 proposed by the Navy
The blame, if any there is, for the fact that we are not presently building two submarines a year rests with Rob Simmons, who was in Congress during the years the planning for those subs should have taken place.
I express no opinions about whether we should be building any subs, primarily because my identity is known, and speaking ill of the sub-building business is a capital offense here in Groton.
I’m too impressionable. These guys were on Colbert last week, so I figured next chance I got, I’d put them up.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_XFMCgeI7c&feature=related[/youtube]
