Metaphor's a hell of a drug

According to NPR's Morning Edition, the reason Michelle Bachman looked so crazy last night on CNN is that she was facing the right (as in to the right) camera instead of the left (as in correct for TV) camera.

The right camera was the webcam broadcasting to Tea Party nation over our beloved tubes. So to the Tea Party, she was eye to eye. To the rest of us, she was looking a little to her right.

Life, she is so sweet to offer us such as this to blog about.

That's Savage!

I have not, to my knowledge, ever read anything by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Terry Savage. And she is a rare bird in not having a wikipedia entry, which is the only way I know how learn things about people, places, or things anymore. But from her latest column, I can glean a couple facts.

The column is a true story about when she and some family members pull over at the side of the road to patronize a little girl's lemonade stand:

Then my brother asked how much each item cost.

"Oh, no," they replied in unison, "they're all free!"

I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: "But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I'm really thirsty!"

His fiancee smiled and commented, "Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving."

That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.

"No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things -- the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give."

First, I can tell that she needs to brush up on the meaning of "spirit."

Second, I can tell that she needs to relax, man.

This is not Mark Krikorian's toy army

corner:

That and 1,200 National Guardsmen Will Get You a Cup of Coffee   [Mark Krikorian]

At CSIS yesterday, JNap announced that the administration "will station an aerial drone in Texas as part of its stepped-up surveillance of criminal trafficking along the Mexican border." That's "an" aerial drone, as in one. She also announced that "federal authorities also have signed an agreement to allow local police from non-border communities to temporarily 'deploy' to the border region to assist with security" — so, local cops aren't allowed to assist the feds in enforcing immigration law in their own communities, but they can do so in other communities?

And on Tuesday, the administration requested funding for 1,000 additional Border Patrol agents, despite the fact that its original FY2011 budget requested a cut in the number of agents. Put all that together, and it's undeniable that border security is a purely political issue for this White House. In other words, the consideration is not "What do we need to do to truly secure our borders?" but "What's the minimum amount of enforcement we can get away with in order to persuade Congress to finally let us have our amnesty?" It's the spoonful of enforcement to help the amnesty go down.

If you've been reading Krikorian--and I hope you have not--you already know that he is bound and determined to conflate illegal immigration with border security. And nobody is saying that they are unrelated issues. But it's very clear that Obama is drawing a distinction between the two, and it's also very clear that Krikorian deliberately ignores the distinction. I'll write it in short words: 

There is a drug and violence problem on the border. That's why the national guard is there. They are not there to do whatever Mark Krikorian thinks should happen on the border. 

You guys are doing it wrong

Racists and other types of idiots are having a quite a time in Arizona. Over at The Corner*, Mark Krikorian approvingly brings us the following news.

As a protest against Arizona’s controversial immigration law, the chambers of commerce from Nuevo Laredo to Matamoros have agreed to set May 25 as a “Day Without Mexicans” on the South Texas border.

Business leaders are calling on all Mexican nationals to avoid crossing the international bridges into the United States for any reason, but particularly for shopping, on that day.

Yes, of the people crossing the border, afternoon shoppers bringing money into the U.S. are clearly the worst.

I've been somewhat dismissive of the whole "Arizona's gone crazy" kerfuffle as a temporary and misguided reaction to legitimate problems with international drug violence. But Josh Marshall points to some uglier stuff going on, and says it is basically overt ethnic strife:

There's a difference between what Trent Lott said and what Harry Reid said

Harry ran afoul of some still-charged, awkward language around race. But he had no ill intent, and in no way was suggesting that "negros" should be treated any differently than the crackers in this country.

Trent, by contrast, embodied the very reason this language is still charged and awkward when he implied that we might be better off if we hadn't ended segregation.

(P.S., more posting today after I figure how to turn comments back on).

Too broad a brush

Drawing a contrast with the complete lack of similar issues from the left wing of our political spectrum, Josh Marshall says what we've all known for some time:

Let's be honest with ourselves: the American right has a deep-seated problem with political violence. It's deep-seated; it's recurrent and it's real. And it endangers the country. It just makes sense to say something the first time they hit the sauce and not wait for things to get really out of hand.

The problem is, of course, that 99.99 percent of right-wingers are peaceful people. And so talking about this real issue is very, very difficult. Statements of fact turn out to be legitimately offensive to folks on the right who would never, ever participate in or advocate for political violence.

It's key, then, when talking about this to acknowledge that we are talking about crazy people, and that, while we may disagree with the political tenets of the right, they are not crazy.

Radio gone wrong

Talk radio this morning is all about Obama - Gates - racism blah blah blah, instead of health care. It's almost as if Obama planned it that way.

I'm not sure who is filling in for Laura Ingraham this morning, but he just suggested that now would be a good time to burgle Gates's house. Ahem.

Future shock

C-SPAN advertised the show as either 'the future of the Republican Party' or 'Conservatism and the future of the Republican Party', but I would have gone with 'Richard Viguerie is batshit insane' and been done with it. You must watch the videos. Here's a short one about the place of conservatism in the world.



The thing that really sticks out is that he's chairman of a website. Which reminds me, can I be Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for thebellman.org? Does this humble blog of record even have a process for awarding offices?

Here's a longer clip about media bias, marketing, the guv'mint plantation and other stuff:



Insightful stuff, I think you'll agree. There are a few more vids youtubeward.

Jeebus

From the freedom fighters over at The Union News. In native form it's an animated gif, but I couldn't download the file so I took two snapshots. Here's the first:



And the second:




Classy!

How's that working out for you?

Remember how the Reagan administration became a laughingstock for allegedly trying to classify ketchup as a vegetable?

This week, the Obama administration warned that Cheerios are a drug. |The Fever Swamp|

To review the ketchup incident, what happened was that the Reagan administration, seeking to save money on free lunches for poor children, attempted to classify ketchup (and, it should be noted, pickle relish) as a vegetable. They were rightly criticized on the grounds that the point of the free lunch program was to ensure that those children had at least one nutritious meal a day. And, yes, they were ridiculed.

As for Cheerios:

In a warning letter, the FDA cited the claim that “you can lower your cholesterol by 4 per cent in six weeks” by eating Cheerios regularly.

It objected to Cheerios’ assertion that “eating two 1½ cup servings daily of Cheerios cereal reduced bad cholesterol when eaten as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol”.

The claims – a central plank of Cheerios marketing for more than two years – go beyond the tightly defined health benefit claim for foods with soluble fibres, such as Cheerios, approved by the FDA for use in food marketing.

Dr Steven Sundloff, head of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety, said the action was “not to impugn Cheerios”, which he called “a product that can be part of a healthy diet”.

But he said: “The packaging clearly carries a drug claim.”|Financial Times|

To get the reading comprehension business out of the way, the Obama administration is claiming that Cheerios are NOT a drug.

But let's not be fooled into thinking that the folks over at The National Review^[1] weren't able to figure that out. The point here wasn't to expose hypocrisy. They're following Alinsky's playbook, rule number five. In case you don't have the playbook memorized, that's the one about ridicule being your most powerful weapon.

Got doubt?: The very next entry over at the Swamp reads, verbatim and in full, "Naturally, the Internet has taken to the frying pan." Reading that, you might think that some fevered yet enterprising fellow traveler has almost instantaneously whipped up a this-is-your-brain-on-cheerios parody. But, no, the link is to a web video of somebody cooking Cheerios in a completely apolitical fashion.

----------
1 -- Have I, by referring to the NRO's daily blog as 'the fever swamp' contributed to the sense that they are imbecile's who shouldn't be expected to know their assholes from their eyeballs? Possibly.

Ok then

Shorter Derb: Gay marriage must remain illegal because Americans are dumb.

(4) If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in. |Secular Right|

Adding: I'd like to know how you get from 'a cognitively-challenged underclass' to laissez-faire capitalism.

Speaking of teh gay marriage: Probably you've already heard about that new poll showing that support for gay marriage has risen dramatically over the last few years. Yglesias suggests that what's going on here is that public opinion is taking its cues from far-sighted politicians who, in deference to demographic realities, have been taking a more pro-equality stance. I disagree, and I'll stand by what I wrote back when Gavin Newsome took matters into his own hands:

Polls consistently show that Americans strongly oppose gay marriage but that there is growing support for civil unions. I'm not sure that I believe those numbers. I think a lot of the civil union supporters see civil unions as a way to advance gay rights without poking the religious right in the eye.

But, as Josh Marshall observed a few days ago, establishing civil unions for gays amounts to official endorsement of the idea that their unions are inferior to heterosexual relationships. It grants rights while taking dignity.

That's a realization he came to because he was confronted with the spectacle of the San Francisco weddings. For the first time he saw married gays and it forced him to rethink his position. Chalk up one vote less for civil unions.

The raw materials are there.

Americans don't believe in discrimination. Opposition to gay marriage can't withstand acquaintance with the real marriages of real gays. |source|

Loose torture ends: Pelosi and the criminalization of policy differences

Since it's torture week here at the blog of record, I thought it might be worth taking a few minutes to address a couple of wingnut talking points that have been making the rounds, but which haven't made their way into our exhaustive coverage.

Let's start with the claim that Democratic leaders in Congress -- and specifically Nancy Pelosi -- knew about the torture program and signed off on it. On one account, perhaps true and perhaps rumor, Pelosi even asked why we weren't using harsher techniques on men like Abu Zubaydah.

It's very difficult to know what precisely happened here. To read the wingnut blogs, Pelosi knew plenty at every step of the way and signed off without objection. That conclusion, however, seems to be based on a combination of cherry picked public statements by Pelosi and hearsay by the likes of Cheney. Perhaps more importantly, anything Pelosi knew about the torture program she would have known on the basis of briefings conducted by the Bush/Cheney executive branch. For my part, I'm not willing to assume that the information provided at those briefings was either true or complete.

But suppose we assume that the wingnut narrative is completely correct. Where does that leave us? It doesn't, I would say, leave us with the conclusion that the Democratic leadership in Congress bears the same kind of blame as those who designed, justified, oversaw, or ordered the creation of the torture program. A failure of oversight by Congress is not in the same league. Not even close.

All that said, if the wingnut narrative is correct, I'm more that willing to throw Pelosi under the bus. If she did, in fact, sign off without objection to the torture program while having a working knowledge of its operation, then she ought not to be in any kind of leadership position in the American government. And I say this as someone who has been impressed with her work throughout her tenure as Speaker.

Which brings me to the second wingnut talking point that I wanted to address. This is the one that says that any attempt to bring the architects of the Bush Administration torture program to justice would amount to the criminalization of policy difference. There is, to be sure, a coherent argument to be made on this general point. That argument would go roughly like this:

1. Laws do not interpret themselves, so each presidential administration must necessarily interpret the law and decide what practical constraints it places on action.

2. Separate administrations may disagree about the correct interpretation of law; in point of fact, a single administration may change its view over time even though there has been no change of law or facts.

3. Because administrations may disagree about the correct interpretation of law, any given administration may also sometimes interpret the law to allow policies which another administration might judge to be illegal.

4. To maintain that such policy differences could result in illegal acts would place in legal jeopardy officials who have done nothing other than what they must to fulfill the duties and obligations of their position.

5. Government officials ought not to be placed in legal jeopardy for fulfilling the duties and obligations of their position.

6. Thus, we ought not to maintain that policy differences resulting from competing interpretations of law could result in illegal acts.

Indeed, we wouldn't want something like an honest disagreement over whether CO2 falls within the scope of the EPA's enabling legislation to lead to criminal prosecutions. But what goes without saying in the argument, and ought to be able to go without saying in general, is that when presidential administrations interpret the law they have a duty to do their very best to interpret the law correctly. The crux of the complaint against the Bush Administration is that they manufactured specious legal justifications rather than interpreting the law in good faith. If that complaint is true, then the argument above would fail to go through. This is because officials who offer (or demand) specious justifications for clearly untenable interpretations of the law have not, in fact, "done nothing other than what they must to fulfill the duties and obligations of their position." On the contrary, they have knowingly and willfully subverted the law.

That's not a policy difference. That's a crime.

Adding: It's probably also worth noting that most of the actual arguments given for the criminalization-of-policy-differences claim are considerably less cogent than the one I've laid out above. Consider the following, posted earlier today at the fever swamp:

Whatever one's position on the propriety of the enhanced interrogation methods, there's no evidence that the use of the methods resulted in the death of a single American. On the contrary, several credible sources maintain that the methods kept Americans from being killed. Nonetheless, some partisans assert that those who crafted the enhanced interrogation policy should be imprisoned.

Contrast that with the position of those same partisans regarding the governmental officials who crafted the famous pre- 9/11 "Wall" — i.e., the Clinton-era policy that separated criminal investigations from intelligence operations, thereby impeding counter-terrorism investigations.

Among other things, the Wall prevented counter-terrorism investigators from accessing the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, days before 9/11. At the time one FBI investigator said, "Someday someone will die — and, wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain problems."

The Wall went beyond what was legally necessary and indisputably rendered Americans more vulnerable to terrorist attacks (whether removal of the Wall would've prevented 9/11 can only be a matter of speculation). The Wall was kept in place by government officials who were on notice that terrorists planned to kill Americans. It was kept in place even after terrorists had succeeded — pre 9/11 — in killing Americans. Maintenance of the policy was reckless and inexcusable — some might even argue that it was criminal. |Peter Kirsanow|

Kirsanow has packed the nonsense so tightly here that he's risked the formation of a bullshit singularity. To pick out just one problem with the argument on offer, he's equivocating between standard and metaphorical uses of the word 'criminal'. The Bush administration knowingly and willfully subverted the law. The Clinton administration, in Kirsanow's own words, "went beyond what was legally necessary." These are different things, even if you work yourself up into a lather and declare that it's criminal to go beyond what is legally necessary.

Obligatory 4/20 joke

He put's the "highest" back in the "highest form of patriotic."

www.superpoop.com

America in revolt, a report from the front lines of the tea party revolution

The wretched scene above, the smoking devastated corpse of the state, is what used to be Ann Arbor, Michigan. The hulking ruin behind the rioters was the federal building, which also housed the post office. Oh, what we have lost!

The crucial connection between the budget and freedom

Adding: Here's another video for when you've got more time.



Noting: Now with video!

Have fun with that!

"Will you rule out reimposing the Fairness Doctrine?" asked Wallace.

"I'm going to leave that issue to Julius Genachowski, our new head of the FCC, to, and the president, to discuss," Axelrod said. "So I don't have an answer for you now."

In June, press secretary Michael Ortiz told Broadcasting & Cable that "Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters."

That's clear enough. But since becoming president, it's been difficult to get such a definitive statement. | politico |

I love it. Believe me when I say that nobody on our side cares about messing around with regulating radio to try and dilute the relative supremacy of crazy wingnuts in that medium. It may have seemed like a good idea to some liberals during the Clinton years (although I never heard anyone talking about it), but these days there is absolutely no appetite for it.

First of all, trying to regulate free speech is distasteful even when it is Constitutional (and here I don't think it should be ruled as such). But really, there's just no point. Everybody knows that the future is the internet, and right now our side is winning over here.

But by all means, right wingers... please continue to obsess about something that's never going to happen! We'll just be over here fixing the country.

img via

The paranoid style in American blogging

A critic commits the genetic fallacy if the critic attempts to discredit or support a claim or an argument because of its origin (genesis) when such an appeal to origins is irrelevant.
Example:

Whatever your reasons are for buying that DVD they've got to be ridiculous. You said yourself that you got the idea for buying it from last night's fortune cookie. Cookies can't think!

Fortune cookies are not reliable sources of information about what DVD to buy, but the reasons the person is willing to give are likely to be quite relevant and should be listened to. The speaker is committing the genetic fallacy by paying too much attention to the genesis of the idea rather than to the reasons offered for it. An ad hominem fallacy is one kind of genetic fallacy, but the genetic fallacy in our passage isn't an ad hominem.

If I learn that your plan for building the shopping center next to the Johnson estate originated with Johnson himself, who is likely to profit from the deal, then my pointing out to the planning commission the origin of the deal would be relevant in their assessing your plan. Because not all appeals to origins are irrelevant, it sometimes can be difficult to decide if the fallacy has been committed. For example, if Sigmund Freud shows that the genesis of a person's belief in God is their desire for a strong father figure, then does it follow that their belief in God is misplaced, or does this reasoning commit the genetic fallacy? |source|

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The polls are wrong this year, very wrong. I have been saying this for months, and I have backed up my claim with both statistical and anecdotal support. The claims I have made have inspired some, caused others to laugh in derision, and brought others to test their assumptions and revisit the hard data. Along the way, there have been a lot of questions about how and why the polls could be wrong. The most common complaint, is that for all of the polls to be wrong, there would need to be some sort of conspiracy, or else an incredibly stupid decision made across the board. Well, I am not a big believer in conspiracies, but I do think that the polling groups have fallen into a groupthink condition. I wrote earlier about the fact that of the major polling groups handling national and state polls, all of them are based deep in pro-Liberal, anti-Conservative territories.

Here's that list of headquarters again, just to punch in that point again:

Poll Headquarters
ABC News 77 W 66th St, #13, New York City, New York
CBS News 524 W 57th St, New York City, New York
FOX News 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York City, New York
Gallup 901 F St NW, Washington DC
Hotline 88 Pine St, 32nd floor, New York City, New York
IBD 12655 Beatrice St. Los Angeles, California
The Los Angeles Times 202 W 1st St, Los Angeles California
Marist Institute 3399 North Rd, Poughkeepsie, New Jersey York
Mason-Dixon 1250 Connecticut Ave #200, Washington DC
Newsweek 251 W 57th St, New York City, New York
The New York Times 1 City Hall, New York City, New York
Pew Research Center 1615 L St NW, #700, Washington DC
Quinnipiac 275 Mount Carmel Ave., Hamden Connecticut
Rasmussen 625 Cookman, #2, Asbury Park, New Jersey
Reuters 3 Times Square, New York City, New York
Survey USA 15 Bloomfield Ave., Verona New Jersey
TIPP 690 Kinderkamack Rd, Oradell, New Jersey
Washington Post 1150 15th St NW, Washington DC
Zogby 901 Broad St, Utica, New York

As I wrote then, it needs noting that all of the major polling organizations are based in locations where liberals are strongest and conservatives weakest, where 'democrat' and 'republican' take on meanings wildly different from the rest of the country. The people making the executive decisions at these polls, most likely including the wording and order of polling questions, whether to focus on urban or suburban areas, the weighting of political affiliation, and the definition of 'likely voter', are most likely in regular contact and association with the most liberal factions of politics. It does not mean that they have deliberately skewed their decisions to support Obama, but it is obvious that there is an apparent conflict of interest in their process modality. |Wizbang|

(via)

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Let's lay out Wizbang's argument schematically:

1. The major polling organizations have their headquarters in the Washington and New York metropolitan areas.

2. Any organization based in those areas is likely to generate work product which is tainted by left leaning partisan bias.

3. Polling questions are work product, so polling questions generated by the major polling organizations will be tainted by left leaning partisan bias.

4. If a polling question is tainted by left leaning partisan bias, then this will be reflected in a left leaning partisan bias in the results of the polls.

5. Thus, the major polling organizations will produce polls with a left leaning partisan results.

Now, there's a lot wrong with this argument but let's keep our focus on the second premise. The key question is, does the premise pick out a fact about the origin of work products which is causally relevant to the content of those products? If we can show that, contra 2, there are organizations based in the New York or Washington metro areas which do not produce left leaning work product, this would tend to show that 2 is an instance of the genetic fallacy.

Here's a list of some organizations based in Washington DC:

• Republican National Committee, 310 First Street, Washington, D. C. 20003
  
• The Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachussettes Ave NE, Washington, D. C. 20002
  
• Daughters of the American Revolution, 1776 D. St. NW, Washington, D. C. 20006
  
• National Association of Manufacturers, 1331 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Washington, DC 20004
  
• National Rifle Association, 11250 Waples Mill Road, Fairfax, VA 22030
  
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1615 H St NW Washington DC 20062
  
• Americans for Tax Reform, 1920 L Street NW, Washington, DC 20036

Those of us who understand introductory logic will see that 2 has been shown to be fallacious. However, others may still wonder whether organizations based in New York City are capable of producing unbiased or, even, conservative work product. Maybe we could ask the folks over at The National Review about that. Their offices are at 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

Sullivan goes there

You may recall that there was some scurrilous, loose talk about the possibility that Trig Palin is actually Bristol's first child, and that Sarah faked her own pregnancy to hide that of her teenage daughter. This bubbling rumor was--we were told at the time--the reason that the Palins disclosed Bristol's current pregnancy (although, just to be scandalously clear, the two alleged Bristol pregnancies do not seem to be mutually exclusive). And, indeed, it seems to have worked. For awhile.

Today, though, I see Andrew Sullivan is picking up on some ongoing reporting on the subject, if only to make a point about Sarah Palin's hypocrisy.

Why would a hospital exhaustively record all births on their premises and leave out easily the most famous baby ever born there? There were only 24 births at Mat-Su in April of this year: it's not like they could have mislaid one. So why is there no formal record of Trig's birth? This is not an "unspeakable" question. It's a simple factual one. Presumably there's an explanation. Perhaps the Palins decided that it would be an invasion of Trig's privacy to have the birth actually recorded in the hospital where he was born. But at least they should be able to tell us that. Or perhaps the hospital decided for some reason not to record that one birth. I have no idea. I do know that if Sarah Palin were running against Sarah Palin, she would demand evidence, as she did with something just as accessible with respect to John Stein's marriage license.

I don't know if there's any there there, but I appreciate the continued focus on Palin's troubling approach to both governing and campaigning. She truly is cut out for the modern Republican party, you betcha!

(image credit)

Paulson's Deregulation Mania

With the Bailout bill now in the statute books, perhaps it's time to reflect on the deregulatory mania that got us here. As recently as March of this year the Treasury put out a Blueprint for a Modernized Financial Regulatory Structure.

The proposal provides a history of the development of financial regulation in the US and outlines short, intermediate and long term "solutions" to the problems identified.

Professor Lawrence Cunningham described the proposal this way:

In the new approach, Congress preempts all state laws and consolidates all power in a senior regulator in Washington. That regulator, in turn, delegates all its functions to self-regulatory organizations from the respective supervised industries. These, in turn, adopt their own regulations, self-certify them for speedy adoption, with limited public notice or comment, and use broad vague statements rather than detailed rules.

This approach, the philosophical heart of the US Treasury Department’s March 2008 blueprint for changing US financial regulation, is procedurally revolutionary and would no doubt revolutionize the substance of the law in these fields.

As a matter of procedure, no longer would the SEC develop or negotiate regulations governing securities markets. The stock exchanges and broker-dealers do so themselves. Nor will the CFTC assure that futures markets operate in an orderly fashion, letting the private National Futures Association do it alone. State banking and insurance regulators are out, a new federal supervisor is in for both, and banks and insurers form private associations to self-regulate. Public supervision, now solely federal, consists mostly of receiving information from participants and, when needed for systemic stability, publicizing this information to market participants so that markets can self-correct.

Substantively, numerous changes should be expected in such a regime. Take examples from the securities context. Restrictions against insider trading would be relaxed considerably or eliminated.|The Coming Regulatory Revolution - Concurring Opinions|

It is difficult to predict the eventual fallout of the current financial fiasco, but we can only hope it will discredit radical proposals like this that would essentially allow financial institutions to self-regulate.

Arguably mathematically not the case

In other words, false.