Archive
April 26, 2009 - May 2, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 200902 May 2009 09:22 pm China Detains Mexican TouristsFallows has the scoop: You can understand why China is nervous, given its dense urban populations and its experience with SARS. You can understand quarantines based on recent presence in a diseased area or possible exposure to diseased people. You can comprehend why direct flights between Mexico and China have for now been called off.
But there is no decent reason for quarantine and detention based solely on nationality. To the best of my information, this blanket quarantine of Mexican citizens is not being applied anyplace else on earth. Let's hope this is a panicky mistake by Chinese and Beijing-area officials and will soon be reversed. It is also worth recognizing the overall aplomb and openness that the Mexican government has been showing in handling the flu outbreak. 02 May 2009 08:13 pm Face of The Day
A young girl navigates her way around Hampton Court maze in the spring sunshine on May 2, 2009 in London, England. The Hampton Court maze is one of the most famous hedge mazes in the world and was planted between 1689 and 1695 by George London and Henry Wise. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images. 02 May 2009 07:33 pm Dreaming Of Blogging"Before this century shall run out, Journalism will be the whole press - the whole human thought. Through that prodigious multiplication which art has given to speech - multiplication to be multiplied a thousand-fold yet - mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood, at the extremities of earth, it will spread from pole to pole. Sudden, instant, burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth, it will be the reign of the human soul in all its plenitude. It will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book - the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a Newspaper," - Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine, 1861. 02 May 2009 05:59 pm The Need For NuclearStephen Dubner pulls a quote from David MacKay's new book Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air: People who want to promote renewables over nuclear, for example, say “offshore wind power could power all U.K. homes”; then they say “new nuclear power stations will do little to tackle climate change” because 10 new nuclear stations would “reduce emissions only by about 4 percent.” This argument is misleading because the playing field is switched half-way through, from the “number of homes powered” to “reduction of emissions.” The truth is that the amount of electrical power generated by the wonderful windmills that “could power all U.K. homes” is exactly the same as the amount that would be generated by the 10 nuclear power stations! “Powering all U.K. homes” accounts for just 4 percent of U.K. emissions.
02 May 2009 05:46 pm A Pot Tipping Point?
Saletan looks at the evidence: My guess is that criminal laws against marijuana use have become culturally untenable. At this point, if you want to maintain criminal laws against more dangerous drugs, you're better off conceding the legality of marijuana, lest the public lose respect for drug laws in general.
02 May 2009 04:28 pm A Secular Case Against Marriage Equality?, Ctd.Derb continues to make his case. His first point: The comment thread here has me wondering how many conservatives we actually have reading Secular Right. So, at a blog that tries to dispel the stereotype that all conservatives are religious, Derb sets up same-sex marriage as a litmus test for conservatism. He continues: Same-sex marriage has never, so far as I know, been proscribed by law anywhere, because it never occurred to lawmakers that it was a thing anyone would want to do! What about DOMA? Continue reading "A Secular Case Against Marriage Equality?, Ctd." » 02 May 2009 04:20 pm Mental Health BreakMusic video for Madness’ new single Dust Devil (how it was shot here): 02 May 2009 03:40 pm The Seniors KindleA Kindle survey shows that the majority of readers are over fifty: The comments themselves are as illuminating as the numbers. So many users said they like Kindle because they suffer from some form of arthritis that multiple posters indicate that they do or do not have arthritis as a matter of course. A variety of other impairments, from weakening eyes and carpal-tunnel-like syndromes to more exotic disabilities dominate the purchase rationales of these posters. Which in turn explains Amazon's pseudo-statistical case that e-book purchases are incremental/additive, rather than cannibalistic of their print sales. Countless people report being able to read much more with Kindle because it overcomes physical obstacles or limitations that had made reading difficult for them previously.
02 May 2009 03:34 pm Truman's CrimesJulian Sanchez brilliantly dismantles the sadistic partisanship of Michael Goldfarb: I realize it’s probably not a position taken often at the offices of the Weekly Standard, but the suggestion that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes is not, in fact, crazy or rare. A Japanese legal review concluded as much two decades after the fact, Albert Einstein claimed before the fact (in a letter to Roosevelt) that the use of an atomic bomb would be a war crime, and indeed, the Wikipedia article devoted to the debate serious people have been having for 60 years contains a lengthy section titled “the bombings as war crimes.” To the extent it’s a controversial claim, it’s controversial because we don’t like calling U.S. presidents war criminals, not because it’s a difficult question whether obliterating entire areas inhabited by large civilian populations with the flimsiest of military targets as a pretext should now be regarded as a war crime. Reporters, of course, were not allowed to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the wake of the atomic drop.
Continue reading "Truman's Crimes" » 02 May 2009 02:48 pm Shadowing Her Subjects
Brooklyn artist Katie Sokoler made cutouts of various characters and taped them around her neighborhood. "I then waited for people to walk by and took a picture at the exact moment they matched up with their silly shadow."
More here. 02 May 2009 02:13 pm The First Victim Of AbuseIt's worth recalling the original American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, the test-case for what was to come. Tom Junod from 2006: The first American to get Abu-Ghraibed, long before
Americans knew they were capable of such an John Walker Lindh was blindfolded and duct-taped naked to a stretcher in Afghanistan. He was being held in a shipping container, and he had a bullet in his thigh, and by the time an FBI agent interrogated him, the bullet had been in his thigh for nearly two weeks and the wound was starting to stink. "Of course, there are no lawyers here," the agent told him, and two days after he gave his statement, he was moved to a ship in the Arabian Sea and the bullet was finally extracted. A reminder of Rumsfeld's role here. 02 May 2009 01:50 pm The Presidents First 100 Days On Facebook, Ctd.Sage Stossel got there first. 02 May 2009 01:28 pm Taming The PrinceDamon Linker wrote a thoughtful post a while back airing the issue of the lee-way an executive should have in deploying extra-constitutional and extra-legal powers in an emergency, such as 9/11. I see every reason to respect such a power, and see it as inherent in the American presidency; at some level it also undergirds the possibility for a constitution at all. The ability of the executive to act with dispatch can be the difference between life and death. The decision, for example, to kill three pirates is not one that the legislature should be debating and pondering; it is one for a president to make in real time with limits on But it is equally clear that the kind of claims that Bush and Cheney made about executive power in the context of the current conflict, especially when allied with the power to seize individuals and torture them on the basis of executive judgment alone, goes far beyond such exigencies. It goes beyond because the emergency that usually justifies this kind of exceptional action is now permanent insofar as the Jihadist threat stretches indefinitely into the future; because the remit of the power is universal in so far as it has no geographical limits, and can extend, as Jose Padilla discovered, to citizens as well as non-citizens; and it is secret, in so far as we knew nothing about the torture policies of Bush and Cheney until long after they had tortured and abused people in their captivity. Permanent, universal and secret powers to detain and torture people using the full force of state power strike me as inimical to the Western experiment in human history, or indeed to any society that prizes freedom. The fact that arguably the leading conservative intellectual in Washington, Charles Krauthammer, has openly supported the power of the president to torture solely on his own discretion and minimally if it could save one single life reveals how much contempt the current right has for individual liberty. This argument, mind you, is not even made retroactively; it is being made proactively - and the Bradbury memo outlines an ongoing permanent torture apparatus at a president's disposal. There comes a point, in other words, when the executive's legitimate power to act in an emergency to save lives morphs into a de facto re-making of the constitution to grant the presidency the powers of a pre-modern monarch - subject solely to the voters' four year "moment of accountability." To my mind, this is an elected tyranny. And the first Americans would gladly have lost a few cities - and countless lives - to resist it. 02 May 2009 01:20 pm How To Make An Impression02 May 2009 12:44 pm A Letter To A Younger Gay SelfStephen Fry addresses his 16-year-old self: Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and
misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately
storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling,
fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely
above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just
to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am
perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but
recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally
unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen:
angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to
feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel.
Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one
thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul. My own less mawkish take on the History Boys - almost a carbon copy of my own, often miserable, gay youth - is here:
And I made it. Happiness is an option. 02 May 2009 11:53 am UntitledVQR sorts through its slush pile and lists the most common titles for submissions. 02 May 2009 11:38 am The Presidents First 100 Days On FacebookNicely done. 02 May 2009 11:35 am The View From Your Window
Wayne, Ohio, 7 am 02 May 2009 10:29 am The New MapBob Kaplan reasserts the importance of geography with regard to foreign policy: The wisdom of geographical determinism endures across the chasm of a century because it recognizes that the most profound struggles of humanity are not about ideas but about control over territory, specifically the heartland and rimlands of Eurasia. Of course, ideas matter, and they span geography. And yet there is a certain geographic logic to where certain ideas take hold. Communist Eastern Europe, Mongolia, China, and North Korea were all contiguous to the great land power of the Soviet Union. Classic fascism was a predominantly European affair. And liberalism nurtured its deepest roots in the United States and Great Britain, essentially island nations and sea powers both. Such determinism is easy to hate but hard to dismiss. I'm not sure how the U.S. is "essentially" an island nation, but the overall point is worth considering. I remember being struck by how many classic texts of political philosophy discuss climate and geography - and theology, for that matter. And yet we gloss over those parts. We shouldn't. The Greeks were wiser than many of us moderns. Montesquieu was no fool either. 02 May 2009 10:27 am Running From And Towards DeathReihan Salam reviews Mark Kleiman's new book on crime: 46,000 Americans die every year on the highways. In contrast,
17,000 die from criminal violence....In some sense, the
decision to avoid crime by fleeing cities in favor of auto-dependent
suburbs is irrational: The move actually increases your chances
of dying prematurely. That crude calculation ignores the angst and
anxiety...No one
wants to live in fear. And for any number of reasons, the fear of an
impersonal auto collision can't match the fear of the indignity of
being mugged, or for that matter being stabbed or shot dead. The
millions of middle -class Americans who fled inner cities were fleeing
this psychic turmoil, and it's hard not to sympathize with them. This
fear also led to an explosion in the ownership of personal firearms and
a climate of political and cultural polarization that is still with us.
02 May 2009 09:37 am Just BecauseScott Adams marvels at "The Power of Ridiculous Reasons": The human mind is wired to accept ridiculous reasons as if they are legitimate. Studies have shown that people are more likely to agree to a favor if the word "because" is used in the request. It doesn't seem to matter what follows that word. As long as the sentence is in the form of a reason, people accept it as though some actual reason is present.
02 May 2009 08:28 am The Un-KarzaiPacker talks to Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s finance minister from 2002 to 2004, and Hamid Karzai's newest challenger for the presidency of Aghanistan: Ghani is a slight, balding man with a gentle voice and a keen mind; his background is in social sciences (he has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia) and the World Bank. He’s the technocratic alternative to the politics of warlordism and corruption, and he’s deeply fluent in the language of international development: words like “stakeholder” and “governance sector” come easily to his tongue. Ghani’s account of what’s gone wrong in Afghanistan is relatively simple, and it overlaps on several counts with the views of the Obama Administration: the Taliban was in retreat until the Bush Administration took its eye off of Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. Since then, Karzai has been held to Iraq’s low standard of security and competence, by which he’s been wrongly judged to have done relatively well. Ghani resigned as finance minister at the end of 2004 because he saw that Karzai was unwilling to take on power brokers that were the sources of corruption and government failure. Since then, the Taliban has made a spectacular comeback, largely due to these failures, and only a change of government will reverse the deterioration.
Friday, May 1, 200901 May 2009 10:33 pm The Daily WrapToday on the Dish we took another long look at accusations that the British tortured prisoners during World War II. But the big story of the day was Souter's retirement, if anything David Souter does can be regarded as news, and a delayed flare-up from the Matthew Shepard case, which we covered here and here. Republicans have already launched a campaign against Specter, just as Independents are on the rise. On torture today, Krauthammer wrote a chilling column, which Greenwald and Froomkin tackled with ease. Horton took on Condi and Henry Farell piled on Crook. Ta-Nehisi just shook his head at Byron York. Our Cheney in the Movies contest concluded here and here. We also watched rabbits swarm Manhattan and superheroes save Cincinnati. In home news, the Dish is on a roll. 01 May 2009 08:46 pm The Charges Are DroppedThat AIPAC case gets tossed and Goldblog applauds. Jamie Kirchick wants me to apologize. Since I merely reported the fact that Rosen was facing a trial, I see no reason to. I tend to agree with Ackerman and Greenwald that this was an ugly legal precedent, whatever one might think of AIPAC. But that doesn't make Rosen a savory character or his obsessive attacks on diversity of opinion in American government to be helpful to the republic. 01 May 2009 07:31 pm The Krauthammer SlopeA reader writes:
01 May 2009 07:07 pm A Majority Wants A Torture ProbeThat's the bottom line from the Research 2000 poll, with 31 percent wanting an independent panel, 21 percent wanting a criminal probe and 22 percent wanting neither. Independents seem notably in favor of further investigation. The notion that maintaining the ban on torture - a key feature of Reagan Republicanism - is now a function of being on the hard left is merely an indication of how far to the authoritarian right the GOP has now gone. I remember when the first association with the right was freedom and limited government. Ha! 01 May 2009 06:49 pm An Era's Drug Of Choice, Ctd.Jonah Lehrer discusses how cognitive enhancers dampen creativity: It makes perfect sense that such a cognitive trade-off would exist. Paying attention to a particular task - like churning out run-on sentences about a road trip, or cramming for an organic chemistry test, or crunching numbers - requires the brain to ignore all sorts of seemingly unrelated thoughts and stimuli bubbling up from below. (The unconscious brain is full of potential distractions.) However, the same thoughts that can be such annoying interruptions are also the engine of creativity, since they allow us to come up with new connections between previously unrelated ideas. (This might be why schizotypal subjects score higher on tests of creativity. They are less able to ignore those distracting thoughts, which largely arise from the right hemisphere.)
01 May 2009 06:15 pm A Question Of The Rule Of Law, Ctd.Henry Farrell has at Clive Crook. My response here. A dissent here. What we can say is that these debates are themselves helpful. I don't mean that as a truism. I mean that because even if we do not get to sustain the rule of law, we have begun to expose the full extent of the last administration's brutality and lawlessness. The OLC Memos, the ICRC Report and the Senate Armed Services Committee Report alone are definitive proof that the Bush administration knowingly violated the Geneva Conventions' Article 3, premeditatedly violated the UN Convention on Torture, set up an ongoing torture apparatus within the CIA, directly authorized the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and lied again and again and again about all of it. In history and in front of the world, they are slowly being exposed and being held accountable in the court of public opinion and under the heavens. In the end, that must count for something. 01 May 2009 05:41 pm The Case Of Matthew Shepard, Ctd.A reader writes:
I agree, but then I've never been on the gay left and have always opposed these laws. There is a real debate about the 20/20 story and, for the sake of balance, you can read the critiques of it here and here. I should be clear: I do not for a minute believe that the bigotry behind the Matthew Shepard murder was a hoax. I think it was murkier and more complicated - i.e. more human - than some want it to be. Of course, if you believe that his murderers deserved the maximum sentence because they brutally murdered someone, and not because they were meth-fueled bigots, it doesn't matter. I want the same laws against the same acts enforced equally on everyone. If police don't enforce the law equally, get on their case. But leave the laws alone. 01 May 2009 05:36 pm Froomkin On KrauthammerThe asterisks are everything in the slide of modern American conservatism into degeneracy. 01 May 2009 05:35 pm Face Of The Day
Margarito Morales and his dog Mickey prepare to march in a May Day demonstration May 1, 2009 in Chicago, Illinois. The march had been threatened with cancellation over concerns about the risks associated with the recent outbreak of swine flu. By Scott Olson/Getty Images. 01 May 2009 05:13 pm Home NewsThe web always surprises. I expected this year's traffic to be markedly down over the same time last year, which was during a frantic and historic primary race. I was wrong. I'm told the Dish's total pageviews in April 2008 were 6.3 million; this past April, they were 10 million. There was one extraneous bump - the fellated priest logo - but that doesn't begin to account for the jump. As to unique visitors - i.e. actual individual human beings - who read the Dish in April 2008: there were 925,000 of you. Last month, there were 1,353,000 of you. The web keeps growing, and we seem to be growing with it. Thanks for coming, and staying. And thanks to Chris Bodenner and Patrick Appel, without whom I couldn't begin to keep up the pace. 01 May 2009 05:08 pm Small Boots To FillRoss marks Obama's first 100 days: [Obama's] administration has only just begun to define itself, and things will almost certainly get harder as the shadow of the Bush Administration recedes. The policy debates for which this administration will be remembered are still ahead of it, and the crises and the defining moments they generate are still to come as well. In a variety of different ways, George W. Bush helped make Barack Obama's first hundred days a ringing success. But he won't be there to help forever.
01 May 2009 05:04 pm Condi Rice's Bad DayShe is used to Beltway journalists who are often more interested in bragging of their access than asking tough questions. Then she met some students who know she is knee-deep in the torture regime. Scott Horton examines her defense. This point seems particularly pertinent: She perpetuates the Abu Ghraib myth (“Abu Ghraib was not policy”), even as the Senate Armed Services Committee report demolishes it. The words she uses are essentially identical to those she uttered to me at a group meeting in the White House in May 2004. But the efforts to delink the abuses in Iraq from the formation of policy in Washington—a process in which Condi played a focal role—have gone flat. The Senate report makes clear that the abuses at Abu Ghraib flowed directly from policy choices made in the National Security Council that Condi ran.
Rice insists that no one was tortured at Guantánamo. She cites an OSCE
report that called it a “model medium security prison.” But, as the
report’s author stressed, this was a characterization of the physical
facility. How about the treatment of the prisoners? On that score, the
OSCE had a different conclusion: it was “mental torture.”
The Red Cross did complete two studies of detainees at Guantánamo, and
Condi’s characterization of them is false. The first report concluded
that the treatment of prisoners, particularly isolation treatment, was “tantamount to torture.” The second examined the use of the Bush Program
and concluded it was “torture,” no qualifications. Rice was furnished
copies of these reports. Did she take the time to read them?
01 May 2009 04:42 pm Independents' DayMore and more people feel like the Daily Dish: 01 May 2009 04:32 pm The Strange And Complicated Story Of Colonel BlimpIf you're interested in the full details of this compelling movie - and why or how Churchill might have tried to stop its production - this piece is pretty definitive. 01 May 2009 04:30 pm InfodemicsDavid Rothkopf has been watching too much cable: Swine flu! World Health Organization at alert level 4! Markets rocked by sell-offs! Howie Mandel was right! Never shake hands! Bathe in Purell! See if you can borrow a face mask from Michael Jackson! Or hold your breath whenever you are near a ham sandwich! Armies of pigs in uniform marching on Washington! Orwell was right: the animals have turned on us, become more dangerous than us! Four legs bad, two legs good! Head for the hills! Once again, the media is reacting to a potential threat with its usual calm, responsibly recognizing that sensational coverage of diseases can have far worse consequences than the diseases themselves. Or not. Drum defends the hacks. 01 May 2009 04:20 pm Mental Health BreakSomeone made a stop-motion vidblog for a trip to Morocco. Certainly beats the usual holiday photo-album: 01 May 2009 03:43 pm Is That A Sea Change I Hear?, Ctd.Ryan Sager looks at the new marriage poll: I want to make the argument that we may be starting to see a “bandwagon effect” that will significantly increase support for gay marriage in the next few years.
The bandwagon effect — relatively well-established in social and political science — is when voters are influenced in their opinions or votes by which side they perceive as having majority support or being the “winning” side. While partisans tend to remain committed, more undecided voters react to two basic impulses: wanting to follow the herd and assuming that the majority of people must have information that they don’t. 01 May 2009 03:19 pm "I'm Doing This For Justice, Justice Long Since Forgotten"Via Allahpundit, Cincinnati's crime fighters: Follow up here. 01 May 2009 02:43 pm Krauthammer: Withdraw From GenevaThat's the only clear inference one can draw from Charles Krauthammer's latest column in defense of the indefensible. Back in 2005, in an influential essay that helped move the US into the ranks of torture states, he wrote:
Let's
take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.
Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?
Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty. But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty. In 2009, the scenario has evolved into this: The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The
bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this
life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Wow. We've gone from justifying torture in order to prevent nuclear holocaust all the way to justifying it for merely saving one innocent person's life. Notice also that all that is required to torture is "the slightest belief" that the torture victim has useful information. This exception is therefore not an exception. It's a rule, allowing anyone in government with any scintilla of a suspicion that a captive has information that could save lives to torture or abuse him. Continue reading "Krauthammer: Withdraw From Geneva" » 01 May 2009 02:20 pm Cheney In The Movies IIICheney as Colonel Kurtz (from :30 to 1:30): "Horror and moral terror are your friends. If not, they are enemies to be feared":
More honorable mentions after the jump:
Continue reading "Cheney In The Movies III" » 01 May 2009 02:09 pm Making Law Students Find Scalia's Home Phone NumberA Fordham law professor and Justice Scalia tussle over privacy law. 01 May 2009 02:04 pm Krauthammer vs ReaganFrom Charles Krauthammer's pro-torture column today:
Greenwald fights back:
Continue reading "Krauthammer vs Reagan " » 01 May 2009 01:49 pm It Wasn't Torture As SuchReaders know that I don't buy for a second that the techniques used against many prisoners by president Bush were somehow not torture or torture-lite or "enhanced interrogation." But let us concede for a moment that everything authorized by Bush and Cheney evaded the definition of torture as "severe mental or physical pain or suffering." What do the Geneva Conventions say about acts of inhuman treatment that do not rise to the level of torture?
Continue reading "It Wasn't Torture As Such" » 01 May 2009 01:17 pm Cool Ad Watch01 May 2009 01:16 pm Nearing The Bottom?Ryan Avent, back at his old digs after Portfolio's closure, thinks there is reason to be hopeful about the economy: Threats remain. Any unforseen shock could get things deteriorating again (and there’s an outside chance that a flu pandemic could be such a shock). It’s also true that a bottom does not mean an end to pain. Recovery will take a long time, and unemployment will remain high well into recovery. But we are nearing a bottom, which is a very, very good thing. There are still a lot of people out there spinning narratives of utter hopelessness, and that strikes me as completely out of step with the changing situation on the ground.
01 May 2009 12:10 pm The Case Of Matthew ShepardVisit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy Many are understandably aghast that some opportunistic and homophobic characters are disputing the idea that the brutal Matthew Shepard killing was purely a hate crime: a young man singled out and beaten to a bloody pulp by strangers solely because he was gay. A pure hate crime was certainly how I first thought of the case, but the notion that the story is a lot murkier is not crazy or bigoted. (How Rachel Maddow could have a segment on this and not raise any of the salient questions I don't know.) I don't doubt that homophobia fueled the disgusting murder. But I am unconvinced it was the sole motive. ABC's 20/20 report brought some serious facts to the table - most specifically the crystal meth binge that the killers had been on, and the original motive being possibly robbery of someone McKinney knew casually:
Continue reading "The Case Of Matthew Shepard" » 01 May 2009 11:58 am Souter's FarewellThe big news of the morning is Supreme Court Justice Souter announcing his retirement. A mini-round up of commentary worth pondering. Josh Marshall: I've heard a few people mention that this represents a political opportunity for the Republicans. But for the life of me I cannot see that. Supreme Court nominations are extremely high stakes battles for partisans on both sides and each party wants to hit a nomination struggle with the most political muscle possible. President Obama has extraordinarily high personal popularity at the moment. His approval rating, while down a bit off the inaugural high, has stabilized and even tracked up a bit at a strong 60%. His party is nearing 60 seats in the senate. And the Specter party-switch, while perhaps not that significant in numerical terms, has left the senate Republican caucus deeply split and demoralized -- with one faction savoring an emasculated, tea-bag-driven ideological purity and another disgusted with the party's ultras and anxious to reenter the actual national political conversation. In other words, it's about the worst footing imaginable for senate Republicans to try to defeat or stand united against whomever Obama chooses. The president will be personally invested and involved. I think it will come down to interviews between Wood, Kagan, Sotomayor, and two more out-of-the-box candidates, perhaps one with significant political experience and another who is a progressive visionary. Continue reading "Souter's Farewell" » 01 May 2009 11:40 am The View From Your Window
Butuan, Philippines, 11.30 am
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