Via Susie:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmz4XX-Q5aw[/youtube]
If he means it, he’ll get my vote. If he keeps talking like this, and he starts to catch on, he’ll probably be shot.
Is there any wonder, by the way, why “a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn’t like John Edwards”.
The tiny country of Antigua, egged on by an American lawyer, has beaten the United States at it’s own game, at least for the moment. It has won a ruling from the U.S. dominated World Trade Organization, which found that the U.S. could not prohibit the on-line gaming industry from soaking up excess American wealth. Not, at least, as long as it lets the home grown gaming industry do the same. The article in today’s Times is full of delicious ironies.
The U.S., which has excoriated other countries for blowing off the WTO is now, guess what, blowing off the WTO. The WTO, in turn, is considering allowing little Antigua to blow off American intellectual property laws, which means that maybe, instead of paying .99 to download a song from ITunes, you may soon be paying 9 cents a song from AntiguaTunes.
Speaking purely as a lawyer, I was most amused by this:
If anything, the Bush administration raised those stakes in May when it announced it was removing gambling services from existing trade agreements. John K. Veroneau, a deputy trade representative, said that the federal government was only “clarifying our view” that it had never meant to include online gambling in any free trade agreements.
“It is truly untenable to think that we would knowingly bargain away something that has been illegal for decade upon decade in this country,” Mr. Veroneau said, adding that Washington is not defying the W.T.O. but simply pursuing its case through all legal channels.
The W.T.O. allowed that Washington probably had not intended to include online gambling when it agreed to the inclusion of “recreational services” and other similar language in agreements reached during the early 1990s, when the W.T.O. was first established. But the organization says it has no choice but to enforce the plain language of the pacts.
What a bummer. That plain language rule will get you every time.
But there’s more. The U.S. sought to justify its position by arguing that just as Muslims could refuse to import alcohol on moral grounds, so we could refuse to import gambling services on moral grounds. The WTO found, in essence, that we are not allowed to be hypocrites, something so unprecedented that it must have caught the U.S. government totally by surprise:
The general rule in the world of international trade agreements is that a country must treat foreign goods and services in the same manner as it treats domestic ones. The United States, the trade body found, permits online wagering through sites like Youbet.com, a publicly traded company that allows visitors to place bets at horse racing tracks around the globe.
And, of course, some form of casino gambling is legal in more than 30 states, and even local governments advertise gambling services when states encourage people to buy a lottery ticket.
Unfortunately, it looks like little Antigua may never enjoy the fruits of its victory. The U.S. may yet strong arm the WTO into seeing things its way. And that’s only fair. It’s “truly untenable” to think that the rules would apply to us.
Look for more stories like this as the Bush Administration enters the homestretch. It’s already won the prize for worst in history going away, but it will sprint to the finish to make sure its record is never exceeded:
The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.
It has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion.
The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand, providing only that mine operators minimize the debris and cause the least environmental harm, although those terms are not clearly defined and to some extent merely restate existing law.
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The regulation is the culmination of six and a half years of work by the administration to make it easier for mining companies to dig more coal to meet growing energy demands and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
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Environmental activists say the rule change will lead to accelerated pillage of vast tracts and the obliteration of hundreds of miles of streams in central Appalachia.“This is a parting gift to the coal industry from this administration,” said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va. “What is at stake is the future of Appalachia. This is an attempt to make legal what has long been illegal.”
We’ll be seeing more of this. After the election, assuming the Democrats don’t blow it (and even if they do, most likely) Bush will set to work giving gifts to corporations like a drunken Santa. There might be some solace in the thought that a Democratic president can undo the harm, but that doesn’t necessarily follow. Clinton, you might remember, tried to do good in his final days, but Bush will be true to his inner Cheney, and do evil all his days.
Buzzflash’s Media Putz of the Week just has to get maximum publicity, so let me add my mite. Erin Burnett of CNBC actually said this:
Ya know, if China were to revalue it’s currency or China is to start making say, toys that don’t have lead in them or food that isn’t poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now, they’re keeping prices low and they’re keeping the prices for mortgages low, too.”
If you don’t believe it you can watch the video at Crooks and Liars. There is, by the way, not a hint of irony in her delivery. By the way, what do you think the odds are that Erin Burnett shops at Wal-Mart herself?
According to the Christian Science Monitor, farmers are turning to prisoners to harvest their fields, at wages ($2.00 per hours) even an illegal immigrant might turn down. The trend is a result of the crackdown on those very illegal immigrants.
We already have the highest documented prison population in the world. If we find ourselves needing a bigger supply of near slave labor than we can look forward to even larger prison populations. It is a fact that incarceration rates in this country are not driven solely, or even largely, by crime rates.The prison construction companies, private prisons and the prison guard unions lobby for tougher laws and mandatory prison terms, both of which, coincidentally, result in more prison construction, more prisons and more (and better paid) union members. It has created a vicious cycle as those political players seek more prisoners to satisfy their ever increasing appetites. Imagine the pressure there will be to create a new stock of impressed labor if the farmworker trend catches on.
Sometimes things happen too fast. Here I was, intending to write about Judge Downey’s nomination to the Appellate Court, which was foundering after it was discovered that he had taken the absurd legal position that illegal immigrants can’t have access to the courts (presumably they still have the right to be sued), when I find that he has already withdrawn his nomination. I’ve seen some pretty weird judicial behavior in my time, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so outrageous as a judge claiming that the courts aren’t open to everyone or demanding that the person before him produce a green card. The unsettling question arises-would the question have been asked had the individual in question not been a Latino?
On the other hand, perhaps more pernicious than the fact that he took such a boneheaded legal position is this mindset:
“Why should a person become a U.S. citizen if they can otherwise enjoy the same rights as the rest of us, especially after 9/11?” Downey said during a divorce hearing.
Yes indeed, why should a non-citizen be able to get a divorce, given that someone they never knew flew a plane into a building.
It’s bad enough that politicians like Bush use the events of 9/11 to shred the constitution and respect for basic human rights, but it’s even worse when a judge does it. At least Bush pretends to direct his ire at people who have some (albeit usually nonexistent) connection to terrorism. It sounds like Downey wants to assign blame for 9/11 to every non-citizen, or at least engage in a sort of presumption that they must pay for what happened. It’s time we all took a deep breath and acknowledged: 9/11 did NOT change everything, nor should it change everything.
Some people act rather strangely when they get on the bench. Some get a sort of god-complex and start to believe that the deference they get is theirs through their own merit and not by dint of the office they hold. That can lead to some strange behavior and, as in this case, some (to say the least) indiscreet language. I hasten to add that I can’t say if this was Downey’s problem-I’ve never been before him. Nor, for that matter, can I say he shouldn’t be on the Appellate Court bench. The next nominee could be far worse, but more close mouthed. These things happen.
While I’m on the subject of judicial nominations, I should add that there’s one judicial promotion I can support. Judge Barry Schaller, who was just appointed to the Supreme Court, served time in the New London circuit court years ago. I appeared before him often. He was, and presumably still is, a rock ribbed Republican. He was not a guy you’d want to be in front of if you were guilty of a crime. Though I’m sure we would disagree on most political issues, I always admired him as a judge. He was unfailingly polite to everyone who came before him, he was never arrogant, he let everyone have their say, and I always felt that he would apply the law as he understood it, whether he agreed with it or not. He was, and hopefully still is, the kind of guy who could almost give conservatives a good name. Of course, I never practiced criminal law. I imagine the folks who practice in that area might have a different take.
Must reading from Juan Cole. A short history of the roots of the “War on Terror”. No excerpt could to it justice. Read the whole thing.
This post ( Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular?) by Glenn Greenwald hits the nail on the head:
For the past several months, Congress’ approval ratings have been as low as, and often lower than, George Bush’s unprecedentedly low ratings. Various media pundits and right-wing advocates use this fact constantly to insinuate that Bush is not uniquely unpopular and Americans have not really turned against Republicans, but rather, there is just a generic dissatisfaction with our political institutions, or more misleadingly still, that Americans are actually angry at Congress for not “doing enough” (by which it is meant that they are excessively investigating and obstructing and not “cooperating” enough).
But the reason for these low approval ratings is as clear as it is meaningful — the overall ratings for Congress are so low because Democrats disapprove of the Democratic Congress almost as much as Republicans do. There is nothing unusual about how Republicans or independents rate the Democratic Congress; the only aspect of any of this that is unusual is that Democrats rate the Congress so low even though it is controlled by their own party. Virtually every poll demonstrates this.
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If Democrats approved of their Congress even close to the rate that Republicans approve of Bush, then Congress’ approval ratings would be at a fairly average level, even high. But not only is Congress’ unpopularity due primarily to Democratic anger, the recent drops in Congressional popularity are due almost exclusively to growing Democratic and independent (but not Republican) frustration with the Congress:
The nine-point drop in Congress’ job approval rating from last month to this month has come exclusively from Democrats and independents, with Democrats’ ratings dropping 11 points (from 32% to 21%) and independents’ ratings dropping 13 points (from 30% to 17%). Republicans’ 18% approval rating is unchanged from last month.
Since Democrats took over Congress in January, there have been three major attributes characterizing their conduct: (1) a failure to stop or restrict the war in Iraq; (2) a general failure/unwillingness to stop Bush on much of anything else of significance (FISA, a failure to reverse any of the excesses of the GOP Congress, such as the Military Commissions Act, lack of limits on his ability to attack Iran, etc.); and (3) numerous investigations, sometimes flashly but thus far inconsequential. There is no rational way to argue that the numerous investigations (item (3)) are responsible for Congressional unpopularity given how overwhelmingly Americans want Congressional investigations of the administration.
Generic ratings of Congress don’t mean much for individual Congressional races, but they do say something about the national mood. People tend to exempt their own Congressperson from their overall view of Congress. I proved that myself today when I happened to run into Joe Courtney on the street in Norwich. I immediately began berating him because Congress hadn’t impeached or imprisoned anyone yet, but I also told him he was doing a good job. Which he is, since he doesn’t run the show up there.
In any event, I think Greenwald is right, and something Joe said provided anecdotal confirmation. When I started railing about impeachment he told me I sounded like all the people at the town hall meeting he’d held the night before. We can only hope that Joe’s not the only one hearing from the pissed off majority. Maybe there’ll be some stiffened spines in Washington this September. It’s time for Karl Rove to see the inside of the Washington jail.
A couple of articles today, one from the Seminal (mostly quoting Jonathan Alter) and one from Firedoglake, set me to thinking about a critical difference between Democrats and Republicans. Oddly enough, the contrast illustrates how each party is deficient, in contrasting ways.
Alter discusses the cave in by the Democrats on the FISA bill, and reveals that the House Democratic leadership (despite the fact that 80% of the caucus was against this obscene unconstitutional power grab) decided to go on vacation because:
The private excuse was that the liberal base wouldn’t be satisfied no matter what they did, and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn’t make the more conservative Senate go along anyway.
When they controlled the Congress the Republicans passed bad legislation precisely because the base wanted it; the Democrats pass bad legislation because they assume their base can’t be satisfied. One side panders to the extreme, the other side blows off the folks that put them in the majority.
And why, really, does this happen?
That’s touched on in the Firedoglake article. Our unlamented former Congressman, Rob Simmons, was a member of a potentially powerful group of Congressman. As alleged “moderate” Republicans, they potentially held the balance of power in the Congress. The potential went unrealized. They allowed themselves to be neutered on every major issue, and most if not all of the minor ones. The Democrats have a similar group or groups, known as the Blue Dog Caucus and the New Democrats. Either of these groups hold the balance of power in the Congress, just as (potentially) did Simmons and his ilk. The difference is that these folks exercise that power, effectively handing control of the Congress to the Republicans on a variety of issues. The leadership, which controls the calendar, could prevent the damage on bills like FISA by simply not bringing them to a vote. The FISA bill never even went through hearings so it could easily have been stalled for months by that expedient. Moreover, those hearings could have been used as an opportunity to make Bush put up or shut up by requiring that he come clean about what he’s been doing. Nonetheless, it was the Blue Dogs and the New Democrats that delivered the bill to Bush. The Republicans completely cowed their “moderates”; the Democrats have no control over their conservatives at all.
More than a year ago Atrios coined the term Friedman Unit, which refers to the successive 6 month periods that Tom Friedman announced we should wait before declaring the war in Iraq a failure.
it appears from today’s very silly column that Tom might be covertly declaring that he has, for himself, decided that the last Friedman Unit has run its course.
First, the silliness:
You see, I have a simple view about both Arab-Israeli peace-making and Iraqi surge-making, and it goes like this: Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering. It’s going nowhere.
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Ditto with Iraqi surges. If it takes a Middle East expert to explain to you why it is working, it’s not working. To be sure, it is good news if the number of Iraqis found dead in Baghdad each night is diminishing. Indeed, it is good news if casualties are down everywhere that U.S. troops have made their presence felt. But all that tells me is something that was obvious from the start of the war, which Donald Rumsfeld ignored: where you put in large numbers of U.S. troops you get security, and where you don’t you get insecurity.
This if fairly nonsensical. There are very good reasons why it sometimes does take expertise to explain things. Indeed, Friedman has been making a living pretending to be the expert who could explain to an increasingly restive public why it should allow one more Friedman unit for success. In today’s column he gives a clear statement of the kind of success he apparently expected:
There’s only one thing at this stage that would truly impress me, and it is this: proof that there is an Iraq, proof that there is a coalition of Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who share our vision of a unified, multiparty, power-sharing, democratizing Iraq and who are willing to forge a social contract that will allow them to maintain such an Iraq — without U.S. troops.
How hard could it be? Why won’t those darn Iraqis get past hundreds of years of history and tribal conflict and adopt a governmental system just like the one we pretend to have? Why can’t they all just get along?
But as I say, Friedman is apparently now willing to admit that the Iraqi invasion has been a failure. Not our failure of course, but a failure of the Iraqi people. After all, who could have known that the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds would not immediately form a liberal democratic system as soon as we finished blowing the place to bits?
In any event, the last Friedman Unit appears to be over. At least for Friedman. The concept, unfortunately lives on. (Cue Joe Lieberman)
