Monthly Archives: October 2012

Justice for Salim Hamdan?

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Salim HamdanRemember Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan? The Bush administration used to love talking about him. He was an example of an important catch in the War on Terror. They were not being ironic. At the time, I remember thinking that we were doing a pretty fucking bad job if the best thing we could claim was that we had captured bin Laden’s driver.

AlterNet noted that putting Hamdan on trial was like trying Hitler’s chauffeur at the Nuremberg Trials because we didn’t have Hitler. Note that Hitler’s chauffeur was not, in fact, tried as a war criminal. This whole Salim Hamdan episode is both wrong and pathetic—it has made the United States look silly or worse.

It seems that Hamdan is finally getting some justice. He had already been exonerated for many trumped up charges like conspiracy in the 911 attacks. But one charge did stick: material support for terrorism. This is a pretty broad understanding of this charge. After all, the government could convict any taxi driver bin Laden hired over the last couple of decades. But okay: it is what it is.

The problem is that the United States only made this new law after Hamdan supposedly violated it. So an appeals court comprised of 3 Bush appointees threw out the conviction.

Of course, Salim Hamdan was released in 2009, after serving the time for his crime. But it’s still nice to know that some modicum of justice is still possible in the United States.

Afterword

This from TopNews.in:

New York, Aug.11 (ANI): Several Americans are outraged that Salim Hamdan—who was Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur before his arrest six years ago—will be out of jail before the end of the year.

But Hamdan’s jury of six military officers apparently agreed with Nasser al-Bahri, an al Qaeda operative interviewed by Jonathan Mahler for his book “The Challenge,” who called Hamdan “a really naive, simple guy who doesn’t know the first thing about jihad and was just tagging along for the job.”

Take a job; go to prison. It’s the law!

Sunday Politics Shows Designed to Suck

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Paul WaldmanPaul Waldman tried to answer the question Why Do the Sunday Shows Suck So Much? over at The American Prospect.

It’s a great title for an article, but unfortunately, Waldman doesn’t really have much to say on the subject. Mostly he just grouses about how predictable it all is. A Democratic spokesman comes on and—Quelle surprise!—he spouts talking points. He suggests that the shows would be better if they used the Up with Chris Hayes model.

Hayes doesn’t bother interviewing politicians or party hacks; instead, he brings on people who know a lot about whatever issue they’ll be discussing, aren’t constrained by the need to score partisan points, and might have something interesting to say. With a little creativity, you could come up with any number of models for how to make programs that are interesting and informative.

He doesn’t say it, but what makes Up a better than average show is that Hayes will not allow people to repeat talking points. In the many months I’ve watched the show, I’ve only ever seen one person try to slip in a talking point (a Republican, of course) and he was savaged for it.

Waldman’s observation gets at the heart of what’s wrong with the Sunday shows: they equate being important with having powerful people on their shows. Asking them not to book John McCain 20 times a year is like asking Entertainment Tonight not to cover Brad and Angelina’s newest baby. It is what these shows do. And the only way they will change is if people stop watching them.

I’m doing my part.

Romney Not Bipartisan

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Romney - No We Can't - NopeDo you remember the first debate where Romney hammered Obama about not reaching across the isle and creating bipartisan consensus? If you are like me, you were angry because working with Democrats in Massachusetts is a hell of lot easier than working with Republicans who have publicly stated that they won’t work with you because they want to make you look bad.

As a result of this, you probably didn’t give Mitt Romney’s claim much thought. I didn’t. And I should have.

Just after the last debate, Michael Wines wrote an excellent news item that looks at this question: Romney Claims of Bipartisanship as Governor Face Challenge. You should read the whole thing, but here is the heart of the matter:

But on closer examination, the record as governor he alluded to looks considerably less burnished than Mr. Romney suggested. Bipartisanship was in short supply; Statehouse Democrats complained he variously ignored, insulted or opposed them, with intermittent charm offensives. He vetoed scores of legislative initiatives and excised budget line items a remarkable 844 times, according to the nonpartisan research group Factcheck.org. Lawmakers reciprocated by quickly overriding the vast bulk of them.

So even Pretend Moderate Mitt is a lie. He was never the guy to reach across the isle. He is an ideologue and always has been.

The 12 Million Job Myth

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Romney's 12 Million Job Myth

Matt Yglesias reports this morning on an analysis by Glenn Kessler about Romney’s claim that in the next four years, his economic plan will create 12 million jobs. I’ve never thought much about it, because in January, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that if we just continue on with current policies, 11 million jobs would be created in the next four years. They have since revised this number down to a bit below 10 million jobs, but it’s the same thing. The take away is that Romney hasn’t been promising much and you can bet that if he were running for reelection in 2016 having created 10 million jobs, he would talk of nothing else.

Kessler notes that Mitt Romney’s 12 million figure comes from three areas:

  1. 7 Million from tax cuts;
  2. 3 million from “Drill Baby Drill”;
  3. 2 million from standing up to China.

There are problems with all of these numbers, but broadly speaking they fall into two categories. First, these job creation numbers are based on longer time lines, like 10 years for tax cut number. Second, these studies aren’t specific to Romney’s policies. In particular, the “energy” number is based upon current policy, not anything new that Romney is proposing.

The China claim is ridiculous on its face. Conservatives always seem to think that China is some naughty school boy that can be intimidated into doing what is in our best interest. It doesn’t work that way. Besides, Romney is not even planning to go after the Chinese for what is really hurting us: undervaluing their currency. (Conservatives hate the idea of a weak dollar, so they rarely talk about this fact which is the main cause of our crumbling manufacturing base.) Romney plans to create 2 million jobs by getting serious about Chinese patent and copyright protections. So the 2 million jobs number is like those record company claims that they are losing $20 billion per year because your daughter made an illegal copy of a Justin Bieber song.

Romney isn’t providing any ideas that are going to improve the economy. In fact, his tax cut proposals will probably not create nearly as many jobs because they will be focused at the top of the income scale (You do know that, right?) where the money will sit around with all the other money that currently isn’t being usefully employed.

Update (16 October 2012 3:14 pm)

Paul Krugman discusses this issue. He ends with an obvious, but important observation:

So they’re just faking it—the same way they have with the “six studies” supposedly validating the tax plan, four of which aren’t studies and one of which actually validates the critics.

What’s amazing here is the contempt the campaign is showing for the voters and the media. Unfortunately, that contempt may be justified.

Update (16 October 2012 3:23 pm)

Everybody’s covering this story. Perhaps they think it’s important? Here’s Ezra Klein:

So Romney’s claim of 12 million jobs over four years breaks down to 7 million jobs over 10 years in an economy that’s already at full employment, 3 million jobs over eight years that have nothing to do with any of Romney’s policies, and 2 million jobs if China suddenly became very, very respectful of U.S. intellectual property laws.

…

This isn’t the first time the Romney campaign has had some trouble getting studies to persuasively prove their point. Their recent white paper and op-ed on the economy either misquoted, selectively quoted, or misread most of the research they mentioned. In fact, it relied heavily on the work of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, and Reinhart and Rogoff were so concerned about the misrepresentations that they wrote a whole new paper rebutting the Romney campaign’s arguments.

And then there are the six studies that supposedly prove their tax plan adds up. That’s perhaps the most brazenly wrong claim of them all.

Djuna Barnes

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Djuna Barnes drawingIf you’re like me, you don’t know Djuna Barnes as a poet. But as you can see on the left, she was also an artist. And a prose writer and many things more. However, unlike in Paris at Midnight, where I discovered her, there is no evidence that she was a serious jitterbugger.

I read through quite a lot of Barnes’ poetry, trying to find something that would be easily digested by my hungry readers. The good news is that unlike serious modern poetry, her work is pretty easy to scan. I understand it on a first reading, which says a lot. Just the same, it isn’t that easy; it isn’t like song lyrics.

This poem is “Seen From the ‘L’.” I don’t know exactly what it is about. There are a few themes that seem to be floating around. There is nakedness as a symbol for communication. There is rumination on the process of becoming and being. But mostly, it is a lovely word picture with a wonderful rhythm:

So she stands—nude—stretching dully
Two amber combs loll through her hair
A vague molested carpet pitches
Down the dusty length of stair.
She does not see, she does not care
      It’s always there.

The frail mosaic on her window
Facing starkly toward the street
Is scribbled there by tipsy sparrows—
Etched there with their rocking feet.
Is fashioned too, by every beat
      Of shirt and sheet.

Still her clothing is less risky
Than her body in its prime,
They are chain-stitched and so is she
Chain-stitched to her soul for time.
Ravelling grandly into vice
Dropping crooked into rhyme.
Slipping through the stitch of virtue,
      Into crime.

Though her lips are vague as fancy
In her youth—
They bloom vivid and repulsive
As the truth.
Even vases in the making
      Are uncouth.

Now that you’ve been all cultured up, you can continue with your day.

Economist Joke

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Dean BakerDean Baker provides us with an excellent joke to start the day. It made me laugh more than The Daily Show (which was quite funny last night) and The Colbert Report (which wasn’t that good).

I love economics humor. There ought to be more of this. Economist jokes are easy to create.

Question: How many economists does it take to fuck the economy?

Answer: Alan Greenspan

This is from Baker’s article The wrecking society: Economics today, which is in the very good Al Jazeera English:

There is an old story from the heyday of the Soviet Union. As part of their May Day celebrations they were parading their latest weapon systems down the street in front of the Kremlin. There was a long column of their newest tanks, followed by a row of tractors pulling missiles. Behind these weapons were four pick-up trucks carrying older men in business suits waving to the crowds.

Seeing this display, the Communist party boss turned to his defense secretary. He praised the tanks and missiles and then said that he didn’t understand the men in business suits. The defense secretary explained that these men were economists, and “their destructive capacity is incredible.”

Update (16 October 2012 8:57)

Everyone seems to think that this joke is a groaner. Well check out this site about the Romney-Ryan tax plan. Note that if you try really hard, you can get the details.

Midnight in Paris

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Midnight in ParisLast night I watched Midnight in Paris. It is quite a good film with lots of honest fun for the intellectually or artistically inclined. On the down side, it is a Woody Allen film. By this I mean that it was continuously delightful but never transcendent. Of course, it will likely also be the best film you will see in the next year.

The main thing that bugged me was how heavy handed the film was about its theme of illusion and reality. It came to a head in the third act where Gil Pender has taken Adriana from her world in 1920s back to the world of 1890. Just as Gil wanted to escape the modern world and live in the 1920s, Adriana wanted to escape back to the 1890s. When Adriana wants to stay, Gil explains the problem. Most of it is unbearable. But like a good neurotic, Allen pulls it back to the reality of better living through chemistry:

I’m having an insight now. It’s a minor one, but it explains the anxiety in my dream that I had. I had a dream the other night where… It was a nightmare where I ran out of Zithromax. And then I went to see the dentist, and he didn’t have any Novocain. You see what I’m saying? These people don’t have any antibiotics!

As a side issue that doesn’t much get in the way, this is all fine. But to make a big deal about it? It detracts, to say the least. Not only is it old news that people dream of a better time. It is old news that people have always known it was old news. This is from 1859:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

But as I said, it is a fun movie. Unfortunately, Modigliani did not live long enough to be one of the characters.

But we’ll always have this:

Modigliani - Portrait of Chaim Soutine
Image of Midnight in Paris from Amazon and licensed under Fair Use. Modigliani portrait is in the public domain.

Debates Would Be Meaningless Even If They Were Debates

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George FarahThe New York Times has an article by Brian Stelter about the presidential debates, Memo Outlines Format and Rules for Candidate Debates. It basically demonstrates the the debates are a sham.

The most important part of the article is a quote from George Farah, “An anti-trust lawyer who runs Open Debates, a group that calls the current debate system antidemocratic.” He says:

In 1992, audience members and the moderator could ask anything, and no one knew the questions to be asked. In 1996, follow-up questions were banned… In 2004, all questions had to be prescreened by the moderator in advance, in some ways arguably reducing the audience members to props. In 2012, there are new restrictions on what the moderator herself can do—no follow-ups, no reinterpretations of questions, nothing really, except keep time and hold the microphone.

Of course, there is also the argument that Lawrence O’Donnell has put forth that the debates are basically useless because they don’t test what a president actually does.

But Farah is correct that we can’t get to the heart of what the candidates believe if we can’t have an honest debate—artificial as the whole process may be.

Newsweek Article or Drug Trip?

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Newsweek - Heaven Is RealErowid is an organization that provides information about drugs and the experiences that drug users report. From the earliest days of its website (that predates the organization by about a decade), it has more focused on psychedelic drugs (but it covers all of them). On the site are lots of “trip reports” where people explain what happened to them while high.

The deliciously evil Max Read over at Gawker has created a test to see if you can tell the difference between passages from Erowid trip reports and the recent Newsweek cover story, Heaven Is Real. Let me offer you a taste of this with one passage each from the Newsweek article and an Erowid trip report. I’ll tell you which is which after you read through them.

First:

As I walked deeper, I could see, standing in the middle of the room, an object similar to an hour glass. It was slowly turning over. I became aware that this vessel, as it tipped over, transferring its contents from the small red end to the larger blue end, was transforming me.

Second:

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this: ‘You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.’ ‘You have nothing to fear.’ ‘There is nothing you can do wrong.’ The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

This is really hard. The truth is, even after looking at the answers, I keep mistaking one for the other. I’m pretty sure that the first one is the trip report and the second is the Newsweek article. But if you really want to be certain, you should click over the the Gawker article and see for yourself.

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about this. I am not ridiculing the drug trip reports. These things are beautiful and meaningful. They say much about what we are as human beings. The problem is with the Newsweek article. It claims to be something that the trip reports do not: a report of some external reality. The human mind—under the influence of drugs or not—has an astounding[1] ability to create narrative structures based upon the smallest of external stimuli.

It’s pathetic that Newsweek doesn’t seem to understand this. But what do you expect when a major news magazine puts Tina Brown in charge?

Thanks to regular reader Andy for pointing me to this.

[1] It’s astounding:

Andrew Sullivan: Don’t Be Like Me

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Andrew SullivanAh, the blogger’s life! Most of it is one long anxiety attack: staying up on the news and writing something fast that doesn’t suck too much. But now and then, something comes along that makes it all worth while. I imagine it is like a great hitter watching an anemic fast ball heading toward the plate. And today, that ball was thrown by Andrew Sullivan over at The Daily Beast.

I know, after the recent laugh fest over Sullivan’s freak out about Obama’s poor debate performance and plummeting poll results, perhaps I should give him a pass. After all, he may be suffering from PTSD. But I’m not going to let him off because what he is doing today is really over the top. Also: he’s kind of a dick.

Sullivan is calling out Jackson Diehl for wanting to invade Syria. What’s with this guy? Does he want to invade every country? These are good questions and they can be summed up the same way that I summed up Sullivan: Diehl is kind of a dick.

But whether it is because Sullivan understands that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones (Dicks shouldn’t call out dicks), he calls out Diehl for being a supporter of the Iraq War:

Remember that there was no—repeat no—consequences for any of Washington’s pundits who backed the Iraq war. Torture-enthusiast, Marc Thiessen, got a column out of it. Liz Cheney parlayed a career atop the corpses of 100,000 dead Iraqis. Charles Krauthammer, architect of the torture policy, advocate for Greater Israel, instigator of the calamity of the Iraq war, for which he has never apologized, is still regarded as the dean of Washington conservatism.

Do you know who also suffered no—repeat no—consequences for supporting the Iraq War? Andrew Sullivan.

On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, Slate asked the question, “How did we get the Iraq War so wrong?” That’s easy: because you employ a bunch of evil idiots. A better question is the one implied by Andrew Sullivan, “Why do evil idiots continue to be employed by major media outlets?” It just so happens I have two answers for that.

  1. Fucktards like Andrew Sullivan don’t even remember being wrong.
  2. The vast majority of the commentariat were wrong about this and don’t like to be around people who were right because that just makes them feel bad.

I think Sullivan should go back to freaking out about Obama’s debate performance.

Afterword

Regular readers will be disappointed that I did not call out Sullivan on his grammar error. All I can say is that I’m feeling kind today.

No Sea Monster?!

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Giant Florida Eyeball Identified
Gino Covacci, the intrepid beachcomber who found the eye on a Florida beach, thought it had belonged to a squid.

But experts who examined the eyeball made their call of swordfish based on the its size (softball), color (blue) and structure (presumably swordfishy), according to a statement from Joan Herrera, curator of collections at the agency’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg.

Based on straight cuts on the bone around the eyeball, Herrera said, experts think an angler cut it out of a swordfish and tossed it overboard.

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I understand why the angler who had wrenched the swordfish from the sea also cut out its eyes and tossed them overboard. Those lifeless, yet reproachful eyes would have haunted him all the way back to shore. Or maybe they’re not edible.

On the other hand, the cavalier reporting of this fascinating drama is not so easily understood. The structure was “presumably swordfishy“? Seems somebody doesn’t take his job very seriously. If news isn’t worth reporting, at least have the decency to pretend that it is.