hilzoy

Petition: Investigate Prisoner Abuse

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by hilzoy Wes Clark has drafted a petition calling on Sen. John Warner, the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to investigate the role of the Bush administration in the various prisoner abuse scandals. It reads: “Chairman Warner: I urge you to investigate the Bush Administration’s role in the prisoner abuse and humiliation that … Read more

Rove, Take 2

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by hilzoy One of the things that went through my mind after Karl Rove’s remarks last Wednesday was: doesn’t he realize that there are Democrats (and even, gasp, liberals) serving in the armed forces? How on earth must it make them feel to know that while they are risking their lives, one of the President’s … Read more

Hagel: We Are Losing The War In Iraq

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by hilzoy

From the Omaha World-Herald, via DKos:

“GRAND ISLAND, Neb. – More than 200 Nebraska American Legion members, who have seen war and conflict themselves, fell quiet here Saturday as Sen. Chuck Hagel bluntly explained why he believes that the United States is losing the war in Iraq. It took 20 minutes, but it boiled down to this: The Bush team sent in too few troops to fight the war leading to today’s chaos and rising deaths of Americans and Iraqis. Terrorists are “pouring in” to Iraq. Basic living standards are worse than a year ago in Iraq. Civil war is perilously close to erupting there. Allies aren’t helping much. The American public is losing its trust in President Bush’s handling of the conflict. And Hagel’s deep fear is that it will all plunge into another Vietnam debacle, prompting Congress to force another abrupt pullout as it did in 1975.

“What we don’t want to happen is for this to end up another Vietnam,” Hagel told the legionnaires, “because the consequences would be catastrophic.” It would be far worse than Vietnam, says Hagel, a twice-wounded veteran of that conflict, which killed 58,000 Americans. Failure in Iraq could lead to many more American deaths, disrupt U.S. oil supplies, damage the Middle East peace effort, spread terrorism and harm America’s stature worldwide, Hagel said. That’s what keeps him on edge these days. (…)”

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David Brooks: Lost In Space

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by hilzoy David Brooks outdoes himself today: “Karl Rove has his theories about what separates liberals from conservatives and I have mine. Mine include the differences between Jeffrey Sachs and George Bush. (…) Sachs is a child of the French Enlightenment. At the end of his new book, “The End of Poverty,” he delivers an … Read more

Sexual Counterrevolutionaries

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by hilzoy

I’ve just been reading (via Pandagon) the oddest article. It’s from Rolling Stone, and it’s about twenty-something Christians who have embraced chastity. And “embraced chastity” is, I think, the right way to put it: they don’t just not have sex, they seem to have made it the organizing principle of their lives in a way that strikes me as very sexualized, and certainly very strange.

“After church one day, Dunbar, Power and I sit on a bench and lean back in the sun and watch Sunday morning stroll by. “Cleavage everywhere,” notes Dunbar, not disapprovingly. Power holds up his right hand. Wrapped around his wrist, in a figure eight, is a black plastic bracelet. “This,” he says, “is a ‘masturband.’ ” One of their friends at college — Pepperdine University — came up with the idea. As long as you stay pure — resist jerking off — you can wear your masturband. Give in, and off it goes, a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? No one wants to shake your hand. “It started with just four of us,” says Dunbar. “Then there were, like, twenty guys wearing them. And girls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew, the more reason you had to refrain.” Dunbar even told his mother. He lasted the longest. “Eight and a half months,” he says. I notice he’s not wearing one now. He’s not embarrassed. Sexuality, he believes, is not a private matter.”

I guess not.

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Oh Dear.

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“TEHRAN, June 25 — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hard-line mayor of Tehran who has invoked Iran’s 1979 revolution and expressed doubts about rapprochement with the United States, won a runoff election Friday and was elected president of the Islamic republic in a landslide, the Interior Ministry announced early Saturday. Ahmadinejad defeated Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former two-term president who had won the first round of voting last week and was attempting to appeal to socially moderate and reform-minded voters.

Ahmadinejad’s election stands to complicate Iran’s gradual engagement with the West, including difficult negotiations over the country’s nuclear program. The apparent victory completes the domination of Iran’s elective offices by the religious fundamentalists who have long held ultimate authority in the theocracy.

“Today is the beginning of a new political era,” Ahmadinejad said as he cast his ballot in a working class neighborhood of Tehran, the capital, where he been mayor for two years.”

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Stop Me Before I Spend Again!

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by hilzoy By a strange coincidence, the National Review had an article yesterday advocating the same approach to Social Security that the Republican Congressional leadership just adopted. It’s too completely disingenuous to merit fisking, but it does contain one crucial falsehood that it’s important to point out: “The gradual phase-in of personal accounts funded by … Read more

Social Security: The Second Time As Farce

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by hilzoy Today’s Washington Post reports on a new Republican Social Security proposal: “After watching the Social Security debate from the sidelines, House Republican leaders yesterday embraced a new approach to Social Security restructuring that would add individual investment accounts to the program, but on a much smaller scale than the Bush administration favors. The … Read more

Ethically Challenged

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by hilzoy

Via TPM, a story from the (San Diego area) North County News:

“Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and a Washington defense contractor continued their silence Tuesday about allegations that the Escondido Republican’s relationship with the contractor may have influenced Cunningham to use his clout to help the company obtain millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. (…)

When a Congressional representative has strong reason to believe that a House member may have committed an ethics violation, any House member may request that the ethics panel investigate the matter. To date, no Congressional representative, Republican or Democrat, has filed such a request pertaining to Cunningham.

While Republicans may have partisan reasons for not asking the House Ethics Committee to investigate Cunningham’s ties to the contractor, Democrats have no such excuse, said Naomi Seligman, deputy director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“If Democrats are all about ethics and integrity, how can they not file a complaint?” she asked.”

Josh Marshall is furious:

“Now, I’ve talked to various knowledgable folks. And the reasons are several. The ethics committee is shut down. So there’s no point in filing a complaint. That’s one of the main excuses. But the real reason seems to be this — and the word comes down right from the House leadership: the Democrats don’t want to start filing ethics complaints against the Republicans because they’re afraid the Republicans will turn around and do the same to them.

They apparently want the ‘truce’ of the late 1990s back in force.

And just so we’re clear, it’s awfully hard to think of anything more pathetic than that. (…)

The Republicans are running a wildly corrupt Congress — particularly on the House side. And the Democrats are so shorn of power that they couldn’t even manage to be very corrupt if they tried. After all, this kind of corruption is about selling access and power. And the Democrats have no access or power!

So how is it exactly that the Democrats should be afraid that the Republicans are going to be able to give as good as they get if there’s an ‘ethics war’ in the House when that is the case. Some are just scared. Others, particularly some of the veterans, don’t want to clamp down too much because they’ve spent ten years out of power and they don’t want all the fun to be over if and when they finally get back in the saddle.

If elected Democrats aren’t able or willing to take a stand against the cash-n-carry legislative ethos of Tom DeLay’s Washington they’re simply not doing the job anyone sent them there to do. And they should be replaced too.”

What he said. To be clear: I blame everyone who has not filed an ethics complaint on this one, Democrat or Republican. But while I can, sort of, understand what the Republicans might be thinking, without particularly liking it, I have no idea at all in what universe this is not an obvious thing for Democrats to do. It is, for them, both right and politically expedient. And they should do it now.

You can find your Representative’s email address here. Whether your Rep is a Democrat or a Republican, write and ask him or her to refer Cunningham’s case to the House Ethics Committee. If this isn’t exactly the sort of case the Committee ought to be investigating, I don’t know what is.

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Retract Or Resign

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by hilzoy NYT, 6/23/2005: “Karl Rove came to the heart of Manhattan last night to rhapsodize about the decline of liberalism in politics, saying Democrats responded weakly to Sept. 11 and had placed American troops in greater danger by criticizing their actions. “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; … Read more

“I say to Bush: ‘Thank you,'”

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by hilzoy Some parts of diplomacy are hard. Negotiating CAFTA, for instance: understanding CAFTA is hard enough, but negotiating it must have been like playing a game of three-dimensional chess in which all the squares and pieces have multiplied like tribbles, and which you somehow have to keep in your head despite this fact. But … Read more

Happy Birthday, Binding Constitution!

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by hilzoy Guess what? Two hundred and seventeen years ago today, on June 21, 1788, New Hampshire ratified the United States Constitution. It was the ninth state to do so, and since the Constitution became binding once nine states ratified it, today is the 217th birthday of our being bound by it. So: Happy birthday … Read more

John Bolton: Negative Space

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by hilzoy

There’s an interesting article in tomorrow’s Washington Post about a variety of logjams that have come unstuck since John Bolton left the State Department. The most important:

“For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.

Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs. (…)

The nuclear dispute with Russia attracted less public attention but proved important internally. A program designed to dispose of 68 tons of weapons-grade plutonium stalled in 2003 when agreements expired and the Bush administration would not renew them unless they included stronger language holding Russia accountable for any nuclear accidents in its territory and protecting U.S. contractors building disposal facilities from liability, even in the case of premeditated actions. Russia refused, and the Bolton-led talks went nowhere for two years.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), one of the architects of the plutonium program, grew incensed that such a technical impasse could hold up a program of “global importance.” He showed up at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee last year to berate Bolton on the matter.

“I submit that Mr. John Bolton, who has been assigned to negotiate this, has a very heavy responsibility” for the impasse, Domenici said at the hearing. “And I hate to say that I am not sure to this point that he’s up to it.”

Rice pressed for the issue to be fixed, leading to a new framework that the two sides hope to ratify at the Group of Eight summit in Scotland in July. “I’m pleased,” Domenici said, “because I’m finally getting some very positive feedback.” “

This is really, really important. I wrote a post before the elections on this administration’s record on nuclear non-proliferation generally, and Russian loose nukes in particular. There are huge quantities of weapons-grade nuclear material sitting around in Russia, poorly guarded and vulnerable to theft. Osama bin Laden has said that he thinks that it is his religious duty to get nuclear weapons. Obviously, if he got them, chances are very good that he would try to use them on us, which would be devastating. Given all that, it’s truly astonishing that we actually secured less nuclear material during the two years after 9/11 than during the two years before 9/11 (Matthew Bunn and Anthony Weir, Securing the Bomb, p. 5). The idea of letting our efforts to secure plutonium stall because we wanted to make sure that US contractors were not liable even for their premeditated actions is just absurd. Apparently, it was John Bolton who held it up, and now that he’s out of the State Department, we can get back to the job of keeping plutonium out of the hands of terrorists.

The story cites several other examples:

“Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Bolton had also resisted using the so-called New York channel for communications with North Korea, a one-on-one meeting used sporadically through Bush’s presidency and most recently revived in May. And fellow U.S. officials said Bolton had opposed a new strategic opening to India offering the prospect of sharing civilian nuclear technology, a move made in March.”

More communication with North Korea; a new approach to Iran: these are important things. I’m glad Bolton isn’t around to screw them up. But the Russian plutonium development is the really big news here. It’s long past time to get serious about that one.

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Clean-up Duty

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by hilzoy

A brief post to note two ideas floating around the blogs that I think are wrong, and to note another which is questionable, and provide the resources for anyone who wants to check it out further. The two ideas that are wrong concern the Downing Street memos; the third concerns Thimerosal and autism.

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Mo Better Yo!

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by hilzoy I have no doubt that all our readers are sitting there, watching their bank balances grow to alarming proportions, and asking themselves: what on earth am I going to do with all this money? Since we at ObWi live to serve, we present not one but two (2!) worthy causes that you can … Read more

Who’s Next?

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by hilzoy Via Body and Soul, the LATimes reports: “Senate Republicans are calling on the Bush administration to reassess U.S. financial support for the International Committee of the Red Cross, charging that the group is using American funds to lobby against U.S. interests. The Senate Republican Policy Committee, which advances the views of the GOP … Read more

Torture: Making Things Clear

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by hilzoy In the course of a somewhat frustrating NYTimes article on what he calls ‘Torture Lite’, Joseph Lelyveld writes this: “It has been more than a year now since we (and, of course, the region in which we presume to be crusading for freedom) were shown a selection of snapshots from Abu Ghraib with … Read more

This Is Interesting.

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by hilzoy

Chris Bowers at MyDD has a story on the audiences of liberal and conservative blogs. Here’s what he finds:

“I spent much of the morning looking at the Blogads traffic rankings. Adding up the 200 blogs that are concerned with politics and either identify or have been identified with Democrats / liberals or Republicans / conservatives, I found 87 blogs that general fit into the “liberal” category and 113 blogs that fit into the conservative category. However, despite the greater number of conservative blogs, the liberal blogs totaled nearly ten million page views per week, while the conservative blogs managed just over six million. I have been tracking the comparative audiences of the two blogosphere off and on for the past nine months, and this is the largest lead for the liberal blogosphere that I have ever found. In September, the margin in favor of Democrats was 25%. In winter, it was 33%. In the spring, it was 50%. Now, it has risen to 65%. This is particularly amazing, since less than two years ago the conservative blogosphere was at least twice the size of the liberal blogosphere.”

Bowers has a theory about why this is. Since MyDD is a liberal site, you might expect that it would be something along the lines of: because we’re right, or perhaps some slightly subtler version, like: because intelligent, insightful people such as ourselves both see the truth and write better blogs. But his theory is entirely different (luckily; had it been one of the above, I would not have bothered with it.) It doesn’t mention the comparative merits either of liberalism and conservatism, or of liberal or conservative blogs, at all.

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Yo!

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by hilzoy Gary is having a fund drive. Here’s the general background. Go to any of those links and click the Paypal button in the upper left hand corner if you want to do the right thing. Thanks.

Is This Really Necessary?

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by hilzoy From the Washington Post: “Defense officials from Russia and the United States last week helped block a new demand for an international probe into the Uzbekistan government’s shooting of hundreds of protesters last month, according to U.S. and diplomatic officials. British and other European officials had pushed to include language calling for an … Read more

The Book of Hinderaker

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by hilzoy by Publius at Law and Politics, is based on the Book of Job. And it’s great. I think approaches the wondrousness of the Poor Man’s ‘Scary Wolves’ ad (now impossible to find, for me at least), Atrios’ ‘Preznit Give Me Turkee’, and John and Belle’s If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride — … Read more

CAFTA

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by hilzoy

My basic views on economics are as follows: I like markets, except in certain specific situations (e.g., health insurance) where I think they don’t work well, usually for fairly specific reasons. But I think that markets obviously require regulation. For this reason I have always found the idea that support for markets somehow implies opposition to all regulation bizarre. Markets need regulation for various reasons, including: (1) Creating the ground rules that allow markets to operate efficiently (e.g., antitrust laws, requiring transparent accounting for publicly traded companies, laws governing intellectual property, etc.) (2) Dealing with market failures. (3) Codifying a national decision that there are certain things we do not want companies to do in their quest for profits. (E.g., child labor laws.)

My views on free trade are basically similar. In general, I support it. (I supported NAFTA, though I would not have done so had I known about its Chapter 11, described below.) I am not swayed by the argument that free trade costs Americans jobs: I don’t particularly like it when Americans lose their jobs, but I do like it when people in poor countries get jobs, and I think that when free trade agreements are done right, the gains outweigh the losses. But my support for free trade agreements is conditional on their incorporating the sorts of regulatory structures just described, like strong provisions protecting labor and the environment.

Environmental laws are attempts to deal with negative externalities: costs associated with producing goods that are not borne by the producer or the consumer, but are instead foisted off on unconsenting third parties. If, for instance, a company pollutes the groundwater in a given community, everyone in that community suffers, but the company does not compensate them for the costs it imposes on them. Environmental laws deal with this either by banning certain forms of pollution or through taxes or fines, which attempt to place the burden of paying for the pollution on the company that produced it. In either case, they are attempts to rectify a market failure, and if they are well designed, they make the market fairer. Trade agreements, in my view, should not undo this by forcing our companies to compete against foreign firms that are allowed to externalize the environmental costs of producing goods, any more than they should force our companies to compete against firms that receive any other sort of subsidy.

Labor laws, if properly designed, do two things. First, they codify social decisions about the minimum conditions in which people should have to work. Absent such laws, companies would face competitive pressure not to try to ensure (for instance) worker safety. If we want people to be assured of some minimally safe environment, we should enact safety regulations to prevent this sort of “race to the bottom”, and to allow companies to provide safe working environments without placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Second, they provide for collective bargaining and grievance procedures, thereby helping to ameliorate what is usually a serious power imbalance between employers and labor. Protections for individual actors are a large part of free trade agreements: for instance, they always include strong protections for investors, rather than leaving those investors’ fates to the legal system in the countries they invest in. I have never seen why the same logic should not apply to workers.

I do not want our companies to have to compete against companies who trash the environment or abuse their employees, and I do want to use the leverage we have in negotiating free trade agreements to create these protections, which I believe will benefit us all. If we have the right ground rules for free trade, then it benefits people on both sides; if not, not.

That is my general view of free trade agreements. I present it so that you will know where I’m coming from. However, I also think that general views on free trade agreements are virtually useless. When it comes to free trade agreements, the devil is in the details, to a much greater extent than in most other areas of policy. And unfortunately, the details are hard for lay people to assess. I have tried to read the actual text of CAFTA, but gave up when I concluded that I was just not going to understand it. (I stopped reading Ulysses for similar reasons.) All those terms of art: what do they mean? Does CAFTA depart from established norms, and if so, how? Are there innocuous-sounding passages that would play out horribly in real life, or vice versa? I have no clue.

Below the fold, I am going to explain some areas of concern about CAFTA that I have unearthed. These lead me to oppose CAFTA. However, the real purpose of this post, besides providing a useful collection of links and thoughts, is to ask for help from anyone who understands any of the issues involved. (von, there’s a question about IP below.)

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It Couldn’t Happen To A Nicer Guy

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by hilzoy

A few months ago, I wrote a post about Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham and his propensity for saying completely nutty things like this:

The Congressional Leadership (in 1992) “ought to be lined up and shot”

About protesters against the war in Vietnam, “I would have no hesitation about lining them up and shooting them,” he said. “Those people should be shot for what they did to us over there.”

Bill Clinton was a KGB dupe

Some members of Congress “will tell you openly that they’re both Communist supporters and socialist supporters” who want “your kids and my kids … to fall under a socialist, Communist regime”.

A rectal procedure he had undergone was “just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank.”

Now, via Talking Points Memo, I find that Rep. Cunningham seems to have some ethics problems above and beyond those revealed in the quotes I just cited. From an article in the San Diego Union Tribune:

“A defense contractor with ties to Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham took a $700,000 loss on the purchase of the congressman’s Del Mar house while the congressman, a member of the influential defense appropriations subcommittee, was supporting the contractor’s efforts to get tens of millions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon.

Mitchell Wade bought the San Diego Republican’s house for $1,675,000 in November 2003 and put it back on the market almost immediately for roughly the same price. But the Del Mar house languished unsold and vacant for 261 days before selling for $975,000.

Meanwhile, Cunningham used the proceeds of the $1,675,000 sale to buy a $2.55 million house in Rancho Santa Fe. And Wade, who had been suffering through a flat period in winning Pentagon contracts, was on a tear – reeling in tens of millions of dollars in defense and intelligence-related contracts. (…)

Congressional and political watchdog organizations expressed concerns, saying the circumstances raise questions about whether the transaction might constitute an illegal campaign contribution or even an official bribe.

“This doesn’t look good at all,” said Larry Noble, director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “It doesn’t look like something that was on the up and up.”

“The potential conflicts here are enormous,” added Brad White, director of investigations for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. (…)

Asked if he and Wade were friends, Cunningham answered, “No more than I am with (Qualcomm founder) Irwin Jacobs or (Titan Corp. founder) Gene Ray or any of the other CEOs.”

Nobody would equate MZM, which is headquartered in the trendy Dupont Circle area in Washington, with San Diego-based giants Qualcomm and Titan. Nor would anyone equate Wade with Jacobs or Ray. Wade was a Pentagon program manager before launching MZM in 1993, and he struggled to get contracts as recently as three years ago.

But in 2003 and 2004, roughly around the time of the house transaction, MZM’s fortunes began to soar. In fiscal year 2003, it received $41 million in defense contracts. Since then, MZM has added tens of millions of dollars in additional contracts, including a $5 million sole source contract to provide interpreters in Iraq.

In 2004, MZM had $66 million in revenues, according to Washington Technology magazine, which put the relative corporate newcomer on its 2005 list of “Top 100 Federal Prime Contractors.” “

So: a struggling defense contractor buys the home of an influential member of the House Appropriations Committee’s Defense Subcommittee, almost immediately puts it back on the market at the same price, and takes a $700,000 loss. By an amazing coincidence, he begins to get lucrative defense contracts at the very same time. Chalk another one up to synchronicity!

Personally, I think Rep. Cunningham should have been voted out of office years ago, on the grounds that anyone who thinks it’s OK to say that his political opponents should be lined up and shot has no place in our government. But if this accomplishes the same thing, I won’t complain. I will, however, note that it is just wrong to give defense contracts out for any reason other than the quality and pricing of the contractor, especially in time of war. We really need the best interpreters we can find to support our troops in Iraq, and anyone who would seek to influence such a contract for personal gain has done something much worse than giving, say, a highway contract to his brother-in-law.

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Another British Memo…

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by hilzoy Via a dKos diary, I see that the Times of London is reporting on a second memo from Tony Blair’s cabinet. From the article: “MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way … Read more

Barack Obama: My Kind Of Democrat

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by hilzoy Barack Obama gave a really wonderful speech at the commencement of Knox College. Excerpts: “As a servant in Rome, you knew you’d spend your life forced to build somebody else’s Empire. As a peasant in 11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard you worked, the local warlord might come and … Read more

More Things We Throw Away

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by hilzoy

I love my country. I love it first because it is my country, just as I love my family because they are my family. And while some things might make me decide to just give up on either my family or my country, it takes a lot more than it would to make me give up on some other family or country, just because they are mine.

But I also love it for the noble experiment I take it to be. We have never completely lived up to our ideals. We enslaved people, slaughtered the indigenous peoples of North America, and so on. But we also always had a set of ideals that we tried to live up to, however imperfectly, and these shine through even the darkest parts of our history, and let us see it as a still unfinished attempt to be something truly great.

I take those ideals to be: that we are a nation of laws; that we are entitled to freely choose our own government, and that that government is legitimate only in virtue of our consent; that our government should leave us free to debate political and social questions and decide them for ourselves, rather than trying to constrain debate, and that it should leave us free to choose our own faith, rather than trying to impose one on us; that we should trust one another, and our government should trust us, to act like responsible adults who can be counted on to choose responsibly, on the whole, even if Rush Limbaugh and Ward Churchill and people like them are allowed to try to convince us of idiotic things; and that the ‘we’ I speak of should encompass all competent adults, not just members of some privileged group. In other words, liberty and equality under the rule of law.

This is a glorious set of ideals, and I love my country for trying to incarnate them, especially since, when our Constitution was written, people were not at all confident that any such government could succeed. (I have spent a lot of time reading Enlightenment moral and political philosophy; democracies and republics were generally thought to require both a small territory and the cultivation of an extreme, unnatural Spartan form of civic virtue. In this context, the creation of the USA was an enormous leap of faith based on some really radical revisions of Locke and Montesquieu, revisions I don’t think either thinker would have endorsed.) It was a crazy, inspired, wonderful idea to try to build a Republic on the ideals I just mentioned, and the astonishing thing is that our founders not only had this idea, but managed to write a Constitution capable of making it work, and then lived by that Constitution consistently enough that it stood the test of time. (Think of other revolutions carried out in the name of noble ideals — France being the obvious example — and how they turned out.) As I think I said in some previous thread, I regard this as a sort of miracle.

For those of us who are American citizens, this is our inheritance. We have been born into an astonishing country, with astonishing values. And it is our job, as citizens, to help keep alive in whatever small way we can, because, like any inheritance, it can be squandered. And the only thing that will keep it intact is if we, who have been lucky enough to inherit it, try to keep faith with those who bequeathed it to us, and do our best to preserve and enhance it for those who come after us.

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Department of Huh?

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by hilzoy Via Brad DeLong comes an LA Times story that is, as Brad says, bizarre. “Iraqis, who are already dealing with food shortages, daily power blackouts and a deadly insurgency, on Sunday received another dose of bad news: Their newly elected leaders may slash budgets and government jobs. Many fear that the move could … Read more

Supreme Court Rules On Medical Marijuana

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by hilzoy The Supreme Court has just issued its ruling in Ashcroft v. Raich, a medical marijuana case. The ruling was 6-3; the majority opinion (by Stevens) is here; the main dissent is here. Basically, the Court argued that Congress does have the right, under the Commerce clause, to regulate marijuana, and that the fact … Read more

When Stories Collide

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by hilzoy John Bolton, meet the Downing Street memo. From the AP: “John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved. … Read more

Watergate: For The Record

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I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about Watergate recently, but I have encountered a few people who have tried to argue that Nixon didn’t do anything that LBJ and Kennedy hadn’t done before him. Some, I think, were not old enough at the time to recall, and have just heard, vaguely, that he … Read more

Look, Ma, I Broke The Army! (Part 2)

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by hilzoy About eight months ago, I wrote a post about the army and reserve’s recruiting problems. I wrote then: “One of the interesting things about being involved with the Clark campaign was getting to talk to the various military people who were involved. The ones I met were generally retired career officers, mostly quite … Read more

Amnesty Take 1,783: In Which I Am Puzzled.

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by hilzoy My initial reaction to the Amnesty report flap was: OK, so Amnesty’s use of the word “gulag” was unfortunate and over the top. So what? This does not mean that Amnesty has “lost its moral compass” or anything; it just means that, like most organizations, AI’s word choice is not infallible. The really … Read more