The Tuesday night, I was very displeased with The Daily Show. Jon Stewart discussed the IRS non-scandal. I thought it was very typical of his occasional hit jobs on the Democrats, which he does apparently because he feels the need to keep his credibility. Although truly, it wasn’t so much a hit job on the Democrats, but rather the government. It is just that the Democrats are the only party that admits to believing we should have a government. I am so tired of this.

There is bureaucracy in any institution that gets large enough. This means that there are bureaucracies in government, business, religion, even family. I don’t like it when people claim that there is some big problem with the government bureaucracy. Over my lifetime, I have seen the government get better and better at serving its citizenry. At the same time, as we have seen corporations get bigger and bigger, I have seen their bureaucracies get worse and worse. And there is literally nothing that any of us can do, unlike in the case of the government where we actually have representatives.

Last night on The Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell saw the segment differently than I did. But then he went on to mention a couple of things that Stewart notably left out. Watch the segment below, because it really is rather good. There was one thing that really annoyed me in The Daily Show segment that O’Donnell didn’t mention. This was Stewart’s offhand comment that conservative groups were more scrutinized. This is not a statement of fact. There were more conservative groups than liberal groups that were scrutinized. I think this was because there were a lot more conservative groups requesting 501(c)4 status. So basically, Jon Stewart was using statistics to lie. O’Donnell added an important point that almost always gets left out: of the groups so wronged by IRS scrutiny, only one actually got denied and it was a liberal group.

But my broader annoyance with The Daily Show segment was the way it was second guessing the IRS. The truth is the 150 MB size of the email in-boxes is not an unreasonable size. I have been using Gmail for roughly eight years now. I have over a dozen email accounts I use it for. I save everything I get that is not spam. And in that time, I’ve only just made it over 1 GB in total storage. It’s easy to point fingers now and say, “Oh, you should have larger in-boxes!” But there will always be these issues.

Stewart also complained that the IRS only keeps email going back six months and then compares that to how long we tax payers have to hold onto records. Now, there is an actual issue here, but it has nothing to do with email or the IRS non-scandal. Once you owe the government money, you always owe it. But if the government owes you a refund and you don’t file for it within three years, well, it’s gone. So imagine the years 1995-1999 where a citizen didn’t file taxes and owed the following to the IRS (parentheses indicate negative values—the IRS owes the citizen): ($5,000), ($6,000), ($7,000), ($5,000), and $3,000. Our citizen paid $20,000 too much in taxes. But he now owes $3,000 in taxes in addition to very large penalties. I actually find that outrageous, but I’m not sure where the humor is.

Regardless, I didn’t find the Stewart segment funny. Complaining about the bureaucracy is more tired than stand-up routines about air travel from the 1970s. But I do think this is all about The Daily Show keeping its “credibility” as an objective arbiter of truth. And that creates a problem. Every time anyone complains that they don’t get their facts right, they point out that they are a comedy show. But if that’s true, why the pretense at objectivity? It’s very clear when Stewart and the gang are just phoning it in. That’s what we saw last week, which is particularly sad, given that the second sequence that made fun of rich Democrats pleading poverty worked quite well. Of course, it is rare that Democrats provide such a rich target as Hillary Clinton claiming the family was broke when they left the White House.

See also: Mainstream Media Freak Out More Than Fox.

For a long time, I’ve had a problem with the “ticking time bomb” hypothetical used by torture apologists. Basically, it is a way to argue against a categorical ban on torture. The argument goes something like this:

Imagine you have a terrorist in your custody who has knowledge of a nuclear bomb in the center of a major American city. He won’t tell you where the bomb is or how to defuse it. So do you torture him to get the information or just let a million people be killed?

The hypothetical has always bugged me because it isn’t a trivial matter to argue against. At the same time, it is clearly a ridiculous hypothetical. And it is evil because the people are not using it to argue that torture is acceptable in extreme cases, but in pretty much all cases. The logic is: if you are willing to torture one person to definitely save a million people, you aren’t completely against torture; therefore, it’s just a question of where you draw the line; thus you liberals want to draw it way out in a case that would never exist, and we want to use it to maybe gain actionable intelligence (even though we can’t point to a single piece of useful intelligence we got through torture).

Two months ago, Conor Friedersdorf provided what I think is an absolutely fabulous counter response to the hypothetical, Torture, Ticking Time Bombs, and Waterboarding Americans:

This gets to the very heart of what I think I’ve always known about the “ticking time bomb” hypothetical: it has nothing to do with whether we should torture or not. As Friedersdorf’s example shows, torture is irrelevant to the hypothetical. You could put anything in there. Perhaps a better example would be killing your children. Would you be willing to kill your children to stop a terrorist from murdering a million people? Maybe you would, but that tells us nothing at all about the morality of killing our children.

I highly recommend reading Friedersdorf’s whole article. It isn’t long, but it deals with a couple of other issues that are worth taking note of. One is his discussion of the hypothetical as something straight out of a comic book. As he puts it, “[U]nless Hollywood screenwriters start engaging in murderous acts of performance art, no actual terror plot is ever going to involve a time bomb, a code to defuse it, a collaborator in custody who has that code, FBI or CIA agents who know it, and a waterboarding table on hand.” It’s just sad that the popularity of 24 has made a lot of people think that (1) torture works[1] and (2) such situations are not only possible but common.

[1] I am not saying that torture does not in many cases provide information. I know, for example, that anyone could torture me and I would provide them with any information they wanted. There are two fundamental problems with this meaning that torture “works.” First, it is almost certain that anyone torturing me would be looking for information that I don’t actually have. So I would make up stuff just to have the torturing stop. Thus, there is a big problem of sifting the good information from the bad. Second, there is a huge opportunity cost with torturing me. In general, rapport building has been found to be far more effective than torturing. I know it would be with me. (I still don’t have any secret information anyone would be interested in, but what are you gonna do?) So the cost of torturing is greater than the gain. Thus, torture does not “work.”

I hate to write about two judicial case in the same day, but what am I going to do? The Supreme Court did something really good. I have to say, a lot of the time, I figure Samuel Alito listens to a case. Then he meets with his team and says, “How can we view this case so that it hurts the maximum number of people?” But today, David Savage at The Los Angeles Times reported, Supreme Court Rules Police Cannot Search Smartphones Without Warrant. It was a unanimous decision. As Louise might say on Bob’s Burgers, “What is this feeling I’m having? It’s like I’m feeling the most conservative members of the Supreme court actually take their jobs seriously. Is that a thing? Am I going crazy?”

Not really. I know that a great deal of affirmative action has gone on at the Supreme Court where mediocre conservatives are appointed because there are so few capable judges who can deal with the cant that is now required by the Republican Party. But nonetheless, they aren’t complete idiots and bind ideologues. Sometimes even they understand that our police state has gotten out of hand. The truth is that it hasn’t been legal for an officer to pull you over and then demand to look at your cell phone. But that doesn’t mean that officers don’t do it all the time. The biggest career criminals are police officers. But this case is even better!

The Court found that even when an officer arrests someone, it isn’t okay to search his cell phone de rigueur. They must have a search warrant, just as they would if they wanted to search the home of someone they arrested. This is exciting news! I don’t mean this in a personal way because everything I do that is even a little questionable, I do in public (ie, this blog). But this is a great increase in freedom. There has been a very long trend in the United States toward destroying the Fourth Amendment. It really is very simple:

What’s particularly exciting about this decision is that the Supreme Court has updated this to the modern era. They have equated our cell phones with our computers and our computers with our homes. As the editorial board wrote in The Los Angeles Times wrote, “This is a historic decision because allowing police to sift through the contents of a modern smartphone gives them access to a wealth of information about a person’s most private and personal affairs, from email messages to family photos to bank statements.”

I still have to admit that I’m surprised with the unanimous decision. As regular readers know, I usually find a great deal of common ground with conservatives (as long as we aren’t talking about something that Fox News is actively propagandizing). But on this issue, conservatives (young and old) have this idea that they have nothing to worry about. Let the NSA record their telephone calls; let the local police bug their kitchens; they have nothing to hide! Except that they do. It’s really as simple as this: what I do in my private life is really no one else’s business. Now, I would define this broadly. I would say that if I want to smoke crack alone in my bedroom, that’s my choice. But even if you want to counter that idea in the various ways that the government has since the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, it certainly should be no one’s business if I dance around in my room to the cool sounds of Barry White.

Put together with the No Fly List decision, this is a great day for liberty. And I mean real liberty, not the pretend kind that the right has defined as the liberty of the super rich to pay no taxes. These decisions make every person in the United States freer!

Update (25 June 2014 8:40 pm)

Reading a bit more, I see that Alito actually only concurred. He thought the majority opinion was too broad. So I was right about Alito. What was he thinking? Nothing much. He’s basically a fascist. And what does that say of the political party that appointed him? A lot.

Would you like some good news for a change of pace? Well I got news for you: I provide you with plenty of good news around here, like how Kagemusha is a great film and the meaning of Jade’s Trick in Shakespeare. But if by “news” you mean “political news” or “news of the day,” well, I have some of that that is good too!

Timothy Phelps and Michael Muskal at The Los Angeles Times reported last night, Federal Judge Declares Government No-Fly List Rules Unconstitutional. The ruling by US District Judge Anna Brown found that it was just a matter of due process. Names are put on the list and people with those names have no way of contesting them. And even when the name on the list really does apply to a particular person, the government has no stated reason for the labeling.

According to the article:

The No Fly List was created, like so much that is bad in America, after 9/11. But it is pretty clear that even if we had had a No Fly List with 21,000 names on it on 9/11, it wouldn’t have stopped the attacks. Has it kept us safe since then as Democratic Senator Most In Need of Retiring Dianne Feinstein has said? Who know?! This is one of the reasons that the government likes to run a tight ship information-wise: when we don’t know anything, we can’t challenge their claims.

This is really all about government laziness and hubris: the idea that it’s too much work to deal with a real threat properly mixed with the idea that only the “little people” get hurt. None of Dianne Feinstein’s or George Bush’s friends ever need worry about boarding a plane. So Judge Brown is doing exactly what the courts should have done years ago: tell the other branches of the government that the No Fly List is a No Go.

I tend to think the ruling will stand, although when it first went to District Court, it was thrown out. It was only when appealed to the 9th Circuit Court that it was reversed and the lower court was told to consider it. At the Supreme Court level, I suspect that Thomas and Alito would overturn this ruling, but I feel that Scalia and Roberts would probably uphold it. The case is so clear and unlike similar cases, the No Fly List isn’t a secret list that allows the court to chicken out and claim defendants can’t prove they’ve been harmed. The harm is clear here. And there is no due process.

So life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness wins one for a change! As Kermit the Frog would say:

Image via Oregon Live.

It is not the case that Dick Cheney has been able to go everywhere in the media and complain about Obama’s policy on Iraq without push back. Most notably, on Fox News, Megyn Kelly said to Cheney, “You said there were no doubts that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the Iraq insurgency was in its last throes back in 2005. And you said after our intervention, extremists would have to ‘rethink their strategy of jihad.'” Cheney’s response in general has been to deny that he was wrong. But more generally, as Steve Benen noted, Cheney Doesn’t Want to Talk About “What Happened 11 or 12 Years Ago.”

I can hardly blame him. Of course, if you listen to him in full, you will notice that he does want to talk about what happened back then. That’s because he wants to blame Obama for what is going wrong in Iraq now and the subtext (and sometimes the actual text) is that things were great in Iraq a decade ago. So he’s being disingenuous when he claims that he doesn’t want to look back. But I think people like me are on solid ground when we ask why Cheney’s solution for problems in Iraq that worked so badly in the past ought to be considered good now.

What really bugs me about this is that Cheney actually can get away with saying, “I don’t want to look back.” And the reason that he can get away with it is that Obama and all the elites of the Democratic Party went along with this idea that we had to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” I’ve always been for a truth and reconciliation commission. You could pardon everyone. I don’t care about punishing these people; I really don’t see the good that it would do. But there would be enormous good that would come from the country admitting publicly to its many recent errors.

If that had happened, then there would be no problem with Cheney running everywhere talking about what to do in Iraq. Everyone would know that he was wrong and even criminal before. But he has a right to be heard. None of us are perfect. Make the case. But instead, we get this kind of pseudo argument, “Well, mistakes may have been made in the past but if we had just continued to make those mistakes for longer everything would have been great so Obama is all wrong.” It’s madness.

More and more, I see the United States like a dysfunctional family where mom is plastered all day and in denial about dad raping the daughter. Everyone knows what’s going on but no one talks about it and so it just continues on. And this problem doesn’t stop with Cheney on the Sunday political talk shows. It just continues to fester right through late 2017 when President Ted Cruz stages a preemptive strike against Ghana and local police departments are encouraged to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” against alleged cannabis smokers.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have spent the last six years licking their lips at the prospect of something Obama might do that they can look back on. To them, Obama’s grand gesture to forgiveness without admission of guilt was just seen as the pathetic move of a weak president. Another Jimmy Carter. It reminds me of the “real power” speech in Schindler’s List: power as mercy.

Obama missed an important point in Schindler’s theory. “A man stole something. He’s brought before the emperor. He throws himself down on the ground. He begs for mercy. He knows he’s going to die. And the emperor… pardons him.” Obama didn’t do that. Obama just closed his eyes and covered his ears and pretended that nothing happened. And the Republicans were right to think that was weakness. Mercy is not pretending that a sin was not committed. Mercy is forgiveness for sins committed. All he did was tell the Republicans that Democrats are too weak to look at reality — something that is an established fact among most Republicans anyway.

So why not Cheney on This Week saying, “But if we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face”? Why not Cheney implicitly accusing President Obama of treason? When it comes to civilians in Afghanistan killed by drone, Obama has plenty of that old fashioned Amon Goeth style power: the power to kill randomly. But when it comes to Oskar Schindler style power as mercy, Obama has no power — at least when it comes to Republicans and Wall Street. He will just ignore new slights and lies the way he ignored old war crimes and financial malfeasance.