Survived the Bar Exam

Let's just hope I never have to do that again.

Gonzales' Testimony

Firedoglake liveblogged the testimony: part I, II, III, IV, and V, where Leahy makes his displeasure clear:

I have a lot more questions, but we aren’t going to get answers to them. I’ll think about submitting them in writing where I also won’t get answers. The tragedy on this is the decent civil servants who deter crime and prosecute crime — who work long hours at difficult jobs protecting the public. I’ve never once asked a DOJ employee or law enforcement personnel what their political affiliation was because it doesn’t matter — what metters is facts and evidence. You come here seeking our trust. Frankly, Mr. AG, you have lost mine, and I have never said this to another cabinet official in my entire career in government. Once the system of justice loses credibility and the public loses faith in it — when that credibility is lost, those career professionals have an uphill battle to do their jobs. This committee is going to do what it must to restore that credibility. I take no pleasure in saying this, but I am seriously, gravely disappointed.

The Galloping Beaver sums up this whole debacle: "Either he's lying or he has the worst memory of attorneys-general in US history."

Harry Potter Complex System Commentary

Rather than pick something out of thin area, recognize the diverse threads that came together to make HP such a success. Easily Distracted identifies 9 tributaries that made it happen.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to rewrite many similar kinds of events using the vocabulary of complex-systems theory. Such a shift isn’t necessarily radically unlike anything we know, but it does strike at the heart of one kind of common explanatory framework that many of us turn to when we’re trying to explain why a social or cultural event has occurred. I’ll call this “popular social science”, a kind of generalized, public-sphere version of the disciplinary practices of economics and political science. It’s regression analysis without the math. People try to explain an event by identifying its causes or inputs and then proceed to identify the single most important independent variable through common sense or observed assertions about the effect size of that variable. So we end up with stories like, “It was going after the squeegee men that reduced crime in New York”, “The reason that 9/11 happened is US training and arming of jihadis in Afghanistan during Soviet occupation”, or “Pirates of the Caribbean 2 sold as well as it did because of Johnny Depp’s performance in the first film, not because the audience liked the second film better than the first.” These are popular arguments about causation, echoed by a variety of scholarly arguments.

When the real causation can be so much more...well, complex.

Hypocrite

John Yoo, hypocrite. Short version of Yoo's argument: "Oh, it's awful when Clinton invokes Executive Privilege, but just dandy when Bush does it." That's hypocrisy, my friends.

Great Point

What FDR and [Martin Luther] King understood is that the truth needs help. It needs stories told about it, works of art made of it, it needs to use symbols and be embedded in myths that people find meaningful. It needs to be yelled from the mountaintops. The truth needs help, but helping it along doesn't mean abandoning it.

-- Stephen Duncombe

What he's saying is, truth needs to speak to the heart and the gut, where the instinctual responses come from, not just the mind, where the rational responses come from.

Spoiler-Free Harry Potter Post

PSA: Your friends taking the bar exam this coming week have probably not read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet, even though it's a whole 36 hours or so after the book became available for sale.

Fun with Spam

This could be one of my sporadic recipe posts, with a title like that.

But it's not.

No, I got spam today, big surprise, but it's spam that made me pay attention to it. That is a surprise.

The spam asked me, "What do you want your website to do?"

What the hell kind of question is that? What do I want my website to *do*? Well, shee-it. I'll tell you what I want my website to do.

I want my website to have kittens.
I want my website to jump rope with me.
I want my website to keep the kids who live on the second floor from getting into too much trouble.
I want my website to stop drinking so much.
I want my website to educate readers on issues of science, politics, law, and government.
I want my website to give me tickets to, oh, anywhere.
I want my website to stop hogging the covers.
I want my website to taste more cheese-y, but without the extra calories.
I want my website to kick ass and take names.
I want my website to impeach the President of the United States for High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
I want my website to impeach the Vice-President of the United States for High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
I want my website to restore the rule of law to this country.
I want my website to make me proud of being an American, instead of ashamed.


But I don't think there's a setting for all that on the Ronco Web-O-Matic.

More's the pity.

Look in the Mirror if You Want to See the Enemy

The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness

This is so wrong it defies any other response than this: we have to get out.

Bill O'Reilly has Lost His Mind

Bill O'Reilly and the Pistol-Packing Mamas In which Bill O'Reilly and one of his guests make up some bizarre story about pink-gun-toting lesbian gangs.

Pink Pistols, A Second Shot In which someone attempts a "correction".

Pink Pistols: Ready, Aim, Fire In which the truth will out. Includes one of the best intro paragraphs for a blog entry I've read in a year. Seriously.

Time for an Intervention

Sara Robinson (of Orcinus, and now, Group News Blog) makes a call for a national intervention. I agree.

Environmental Updates

South China City Hit By Toxic Red Tide of Algae

"This is the biggest red tide that has ever appeared off the city's coast," the China Daily quoted Zhou Kai, an expert with the local marine environment monitoring station, as saying.

Zhou said the 50-sq-km (19-sq-mile) slick off the west coast of Shenzhen, a major industrial centre bordering Hong Kong in Guangdong province, was the third outbreak this year and was likely to persist without rain.

One-Third of U.S. Water Estuaries in Bad Shape

The EPA analyzed 1,239 sites in its first survey of the country's 28 major estuaries, which provide breeding grounds and shelter for fish and birds.

It found that bodies of water with large numbers of people living nearby suffered the most. While counties with big estuaries make up only 6 percent of the coastal land area, they contain more than two-thirds of the coastal population.

New Blood Tests Needed After Dominican Delays Ruin Survey Into Polluted Site

Blood samples from children in one of the world's most polluted places will have to be retaken, prompting fears the cleanup will be further delayed at the site nicknamed "the Dominican Chernobyl," researchers said Tuesday.

Testing delays ruined the samples from 230 children living in the port town of Haina, where run-off from a former battery recycling plant has poisoned scores of people, said Steve Osborne, a spokesman for the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

Surge of Dead Seabirds Alarms Scientists

The deaths of the birds -- similar to gulls and called greater shearwaters -- have wildlife officials worried about possible changes in the ocean that could have affected the fish that the birds usually eat.

Dutch Try To Grow Environment-Friendly Meat in Lab

Although it is in its early stages, the idea is to replace harvesting meat from livestock with a process that eliminates the need for animal feed, transport, land use and the methane expelled by animals, which all hurt the environment, [Utrecht University veterinary science professor Bernard Roelen] said.

"Keeping animals just to eat them is in fact not so good for the environment," said Roelen. "Animals need to grow, and animals produce many things that you do not eat."

I'd eat it.

Greenwald on the Authoritarian Mind

Tucker, Jonah, Elizabeth and Jillian

Our Leaders are Good and want to protect us. Therefore, we must accept -- and even be grateful -- when they prevent us from knowing what they are doing. The less we know, the more powerful our Leaders are. And that is something we accept and celebrate, for our Leaders are Good and we trust that the more powerful they are, the better we all shall be.

If this piques your interest in understanding authoritarianism, start reading Orcinus.

Compare and contrast with Theodore C. Sorenson's The New Vision: The speech I want the Democratic nominee to give, which calls out to the best of American ideals, rather than fear, hate, and willful ignorance.

Other Half of Four-Part WaPo Cheney Series

Cheney, Part III and Part IV


Publius has some interesting remarks over at ObsidianWings:

[D]ismissing Cheney as “evil” is too easy. Cheney is not some one-time moral aberration, he is the product of deeper, more structural flaws in the American political system. For that reason, we can expect future Cheneys if these fundamental flaws aren’t recognized and addressed.

P gets into the ideological aspect of the broader "process" -- asserting, quite rightly, I think, that "the emergence of a shadow presidency" was "the direct product of the ideology of the 2000 election."

Money and outdated election systems create their own problems, but they don’t necessarily lead to electing inexperienced, unqualified presidents. What does lead to electing inexperienced, unqualified presidents is a media narrative and public debate focused on juvenile, high-school popularity-type criteria.

And now, for my voice, in a brief remark that I shall leave to you, gentle reader, to unpack, mostly, whilst I go back to studying for the bar exam:

We changed how we elect presidents, with JFK. Look, not content, became pre-eminent when Nixon sweated in televised debate with JFK in 1960.

From the Eagleton Digital Archive of American Politics:

Indeed, those who heard the first debate on the radio pronounced Nixon the winner. But the 70 million who watched television saw a candidate still sickly and obviously discomforted by Kennedy's smooth delivery and charisma. Those television viewers focused on what they saw, not what they heard.

Thanks, TV. Now, the Internet, founded in content rather than look, many community voices rather than one paternalistic one, may save us, I don't know. It's changed so over the years, so, I just don't know.

ObsidianWings on the WaPo Cheney articles

The Cheney Series: Abu Ghraib

Second, John Yoo "verbally warned lawyers for the president, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that it would be dangerous as a matter of policy to permit military interrogators to use the harshest techniques, because the armed services, vastly larger than the CIA, could overuse the tools or exceed the limits." The fact that these techniques spread through the military was not some sort of tragic unforeseen event. They were warned that this might happen; they decided to allow the use of these techniques anyways; and if they did anything to try to prevent something like Abu Ghraib from happening as a result -- if they tried hard to train everyone involved in interrogations about what they could do and what they could not -- I haven't heard about it yet.

The Cheney Series: War Crimes

Time after time, various people say to Cheney and his staff: look, you need to realize that this line of argument will never be accepted by the courts. And every time, Cheney's response is: we insist on everything; we concede nothing; screw them. There is, as far as I can tell, no acknowledgement of the fact that the Courts have an independent role in setting out the legal limits on the actions of the Executive, or that they are anything more than an annoying hoop that has to be jumped through. Similarly with the Congress.

For this reason, it's not surprising that Cheney treats reversals of his policies in the Courts, or Congressional action overruling them, not as setting limits on what he should do, but as minor setbacks in a bureaucratic war, setbacks that he can overturn through deviousness and persistence. It's worth stopping to think about how wrong this is.

The Cheney Series: Weakness And Dysfunction

Besides explaining the backstory behind the administration's policy on torture, the Post's series of articles on Cheney (1, 2) also makes it clear that Dick Cheney is the co-worker from hell: secretive, devious, vindictive, backstabbing, and absolutely relentless in pursuit of his goals.

.

Part 2 of WaPo's article on Cheney

"Pushing the Envelope of Presidential Power"