average vs average

Atrios points out that Sotomayor is neither rich nor average. Indeed, it seems like just yesterday that we learned $20k-$30K medical bills sent lots of people into bankruptcy.

we must not waste our precious bodily fluids

As Paul Krugman points out, the people in government working on today's problems wouldn't really be distracted by trials or investigations into torture. In the same paper, Roger Cohen whines that everyone got it wrong, so there's no point in dwelling on the past. Krugman is, of course, as right as Cohen is wrong. It should be remarkable to see words like

The press failed... Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

opposite a column written by someone who did not fail, who did not fail to scrutinize, who did not spin words in feckless patterns, but it's so common, it's trite. Somewhere in the Village rulebook, there's a provision that requires such counterpoint, and requires that the one who writes of a world that didn't exist to be treated as serious, while the one who describes the world as it was is derided as destructive of the normal order.

But I digress. I was supposed to be discussing the wasting of precious bodily fluids.

Who would be distracted, who would be mired in the past and unable to move forward by serious investigations and prosecutions of those who committed crimes and blackened our national soul over the past eight years? Not those on the hard left, not those trying to solve the problems of today, not those who were right. The Cohens, the Hannitys, the Becks, and Limbaughs of the world, however, would be forced to explain and defend themselves endlessly. Democratic fellow travelers, those who enabled and abetted the crimes of Bush administration, would be put on the defensive. The punditocracy who cheered them on and rationalized them would be forced to confront time and again how empty and (yes) feckless they were and continue to be.

In short, those who would be distracted and forced to waste their precious bodily fluids are exactly those who, lacking backbone and any semblance of moral fiber, shouldn't be contributing to discussions about the future, anyway. That investigations and prosecutions would distract them and waste their energy is a feature, not a bug.

those in authority should always feel safe

Several blogs have noted the new Supreme Case in the war on everyone. Most of us feel revulsion over the facts of the case, but apparently not everyone. From the NYT article:

Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, dissenting, said the case was in some ways “a close call...”

“Do we really want to encourage cases,” Professor Arum asked, “where students and parents are seeking monetary damages against educators in such school-specific matters where reasonable people can disagree about what is appropriate under the circumstances?”

Of course not. The last thing we need are people in authority who have to worry about the consequences of their actions. Administrators shouldn't have to worry about either the effects of a search on its target or the possible future effects on themselves should they be sued. Phone companies shouldn't have to worry about the effects on the privacy of their customers if they allow the government to proceed with unlawful searches, and they certainly shouldn't have to worry about effects on their future bottom lines if they're assessed damages. Interrogators shouldn't have to worry about the pain they subject their subjects to, neither should they worry that they'll be held accountable. Police shouldn't have to worry about the health of those they shoot or tase, and shouldn't fear prosecution if their actions kill someone.

No one in authority should ever have to worry about the consequences of their actions. Such concerns are only for the little people. What's the point of having a position of authority if your use of power can be questioned? Where's the fun in that?

Standing up for workers' rights

The US Chamber of Commerce President has our backs:

"You've got to go up and tell them what will happen [if the bill passes], that no one is going to add a single job in the United States," Chamber president Thomas Donahue told the assembled. "Will I put a job here where it'll get unionized in an illegal way? No, I'll put it somewhere else."

He loves workers so much that rather than see them deprived of the right to a secret ballot, he'll ship their jobs overseas, where workers' right to work without representation is properly respected.

corporate taxes and overall progressivity

In case you haven't seen this yet, the CBO has released a report showing that our tax system is, in fact, progressive.

This analysis rests on Table 1, where one sub-table assigns an "Effective Corporate Income Tax Rate" for each income group, by assigning all such corporate taxes proportionally to non-wage income. Since higher income groups have more non-wage income, they bear a disproportionate share of such taxes (40% of the entire tax burden for the top 0.01%).

That assignment only makes sense if you assume the economy to be uncompetitive. In an uncompetitive economy, a lower corporate tax would translate immediately into profits. In a competitive one, it seems that income tax is a corporate cost like any other, and that lowering the cost would lower prices, increase revenue, increase labor demand (and therefore wages), etc. I'm not sure how much of the tax should be assigned to each group (I can make a naive case that if 10% of corporate revenue is profit, 10% of the taxes should be assigned to owners, but don't have much confidence in it), but it's unreasonable to assign all of it to owners.

By assigning all the costs of corporate taxes to owners, the report is implicitly arguing that the economy is uncompetitive, and that raising corporate taxes would only affect the rich. This may be the first time I've heard conservatives make that argument.

the rule of law

Digby has written extensively lately of the Administration's expansive view of executive power and disdain for both the Congress and the American people, and how those views suggest they will ignore any attempt by Congress to constrain their behavior. There's almost nothing in the record of this Administration that would contradict that view.

At the root of the problem is the fact that while Congress makes laws and the Supreme Court interprets them, the President has sole executive power. Everyone in the Federal government who would actually enforce a law or a judgement works for the President, and after six years of this administration, there's almost no one left in a position of authority who hasn't been tested for either ideological purity or extraordinary compliance.

If, as appears possible, we're on the verge of a Constitutional collision between branches of historic proportion, it might be time to ask ourselves what limits this Administration does perceive. If it can ignore Congressional authority over its ability to wage war or to conduct domestic surveillance without warrants, for example, what else can it ignore? If it can ignore the courts on treatment of prisoners, what else can it ignore? What are the limits of an executive unconstrained by concern for public opinion, convinced that he is divinely inspired and led, supported by a cadre of like fanatics? Is the rule of law--any rule of law--protection against an executive convinced he serves a higher authority?

I've written before that I am less concerned with whether a politician follows the letter of the law than I am with who he serves. I prefer a personally corrupt politician who advances the public good to a paragon of personal virtue who destroys it. In this case, I'd certainly prefer a politician who respected our Constitution more and his own judgement less. Is that a contradiction? Perhaps, perhaps not.

In the end, our laws are only as good as the people we elect to enforce them. It's important to elect people with enough humility to realize that they are not us, they only represent us. Respect for law is one marker of that humility. Respect for the opinions of those who disagree with you is another.

If we elect people who lack that humility--and who have repeatedly demonstrated that lack--no body of law will protect us.

Mercy for our friends, vengeance for our enemies

It has been amusing over the past few days to watch the same people who claim that executions are necessary for "closure," who cheered the hanging of Saddam Hussein and regretted only that it was not more thuggish than it actually was, eulogize President Ford for his wisdom in sparing the country a full accounting of Nixon's crimes.

Wednesday, Thursday

Wednesday: ISG says US must engage diplomatically with Syria and Iran to avoid disaster in Iraq.

Thursday: Bush tells Iran and Syria what they must do to earn the privilege of saving us from disaster.

what's wrong with timetables, anyway?

We've heard over and over that setting timetables would be a big mistake, that it would show a lack of resolve, embolden our enemies, etc. In most other situations, the inability to set a timetable shows the exact opposite: either that those presenting the plan aren't committed to it, or that the problem is not, in fact, understood. To say that we can't set a timetable is to say that we don't in fact have a reliable plan, that if our enemies knew even that much about our plans, they could disrupt them. It's an admission of weakness, not of strength.

The hilarious part of this (I laugh myself to sleep thinking about it every night) is that those who argue most strenuously against timetables invoke them regularly. How often have we heard that the next six months are the key? Don't such statements invoke a deadline, a timetable if you will, for dramatic improvement?

refreshed macs with dirty disks

Jacqui relates the amusing story of someone purchased a refreshed mac, only to find the desktop covered with porn links. She's skeptical, and I can appreciate her caution in the face of a story that reeks of urban legend.

In my case, I didn't have a desktop full of porn, but something (presumably my disk) had not been cleaned. The test drive version of Office, for example, is convinced I'm Swedish. The shell is convinced my machine is called "bench3-3", a name I never typed in.

The big problem with this isn't that you might find annoying content on your desktop (though some such content is illegal, and even if you delete it, it might show up in a forensic search), but that returning a failed computer to apple might expose confidential information to whoever eventually gets the disk. This is particularly disturbing because when a customer returns a broken system, they may not have the opportunity to clear the disks themselves.

ethics and objectivity

This bit in Joshua's post caught my eye:

What struck me about the exchange is that I had tied vapid and timid media coverage to Americans' often shocking ignorance about their own political system and said it was perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy. But while he agreed that there was a major problem with the public's political knowledge and participation, he flat-out refused to acknowledge that it had any connection to the rules by which he insisted he had to live.

That, I think, is the essential flaw at the heart of the ethic of objectivity. Ethics aren't merely standards of personal morality, they're rules that allow communities to work and flourish. They exist to support good outcomes. If the ethical code demands objectivity, prohibits those who enforce and maintain the code from caring about results (ie, Mark "I've never voted" Halperin), then the code itself becomes unmoored. Bad results get ignored because the ethicists themselves refuse to judge the outcomes; they merely observe.

This is not the norm in other spheres. Medical ethicists and legal ethicists care predominately about results and revise ethical codes when current codes fail. Judges are required to be objective, but legislatures exist to change the laws when the "objective" interpretation of the law leads to bad results. If the objective norm fails to keep the public well-informed, how can "objective" journalists respond? How can they prevent themselves from being gamed if they refuse to judge the outcomes of their actions?

npr vs lamont and the blogosphere

Yesterday morning, NPR ran a pair of remarkable reports about the Lieberman/Lamont campaign and the DLC, in which they managed to discuss the race in Connecticut without quoting anyone who supports Lamont, and the struggle between the netroots and the DLC without quoting anyone from the netroots.

The first was a report from David Welna, who reported on Clinton's campaign for Lieberman, characterized Lamont only as a "millionaire," quoted Lieberman supporters on the air characterizing Lamont supporters as a "screaming minority," and reduced the race to a single issue: the war on Iraq. There were no quotes or comments from Lamont supporters. It's hard to believe they declined to provide comments, but the only other conclusion is that no comments were sought.

The second, blending almost seamlessly with the first, was about the "debate between the left and center of the Democratic Party." It describes how the DLC is now battling the "netwired, left-wing populists working so hard to defeat Joe Lieberman." The DLC is allowed to characterize itself and tout its accomplishments, but the characterization of the "blogosphere" and the "activist base of the party," is left to Mara Liasson herself. The closest she comes to allowing the base to speak for themselves is to quote Democratic Party official Elaine Kaymark, someone who has "worked with both the DLC and anti-war Democrats."

Perhaps NPR has finally taken the advice of those who've said that journalists should abandon their pose of neutrality and speak with their own voice rather than merely presenting the views of both sides. On the other hand, only one side of the debate was silenced. The "centrists" were given ample time to make their case, only the populist, activist, left was excluded. Lieberman's supporters were allowed to make their case. Lamont's supporters were not.

the myth of the neutral net

While I am sympathetic to the notion that The Net Should Be Neutral, I have a hard time seeing how the recent changes present existential threats to the Net As We Know It. The Net has never been neutral. It is hard to imagine how it could be.

Let's start from the most obvious point, the connection from a server to an ISP. Half the country still connects to the internet via dial-up lines. Since these connections are not always-on, systems behind those lines are not fully part of the Net.

People get around that by subscribing to hosting services. That's great, but hosting services price by the level of service. Anyone who's tried to run a website then had it get too popular (instapounded, atriated, fark'd, slashdot'd, etc.) knows that you have to pay more to reach a wider audience.

More subtly, the Net is not an amorphous blob of bandwidth. It's a series of point-to-point connections. The route from my system to cnn.com has at least 16 hops. It has 80 ms of latency. Yahoo.com has 10 hops and 20ms latency. If I do the same test from our family website, I see 13 hops and 75ms latency to cnn.com, and 11 hops and 80ms latency to yahoo.com. I suspect high-level ISPs already compete with one another to provide the lowest latency and highest bandwidth to the broadest area. The only way to eliminate such biases would be to eliminate competition between ISPs.

In truth, it gets more complicated than that. Some sites are geographically mirrored. Some aren't. Some are cached. Some push content out through dedicated content distribution networks so that the bulk of data is close to the client. All of these approaches require more expertise and money than casual internet users are able or willing to muster, and there's almost nothing that can be done to prevent them.

So if companies start differentiating between their customers, it's not as if they're destroying a level playing field. The field has never been level and won't be until bandwidth, storage, and computing are free.

Such practices may make things marginally worse, but they may also make them marginally better. Improving service today is expensive. If backbones commoditize service priorities, they should be less expensive than the approaches described above. If they're less expensive, they'll be available to a wider range of customers. Upgrading your web hosting service could include upgraded backbone service as part of the package.

I'm not a pollyanna about this (or much else, I guess), but on my potential end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scale, I'd have to give this no more than a 1% Abu Ghraib.

fighting for values

Barack Obama says that Senators shouldn't attempt to filibuster, but should instead convince Americans that their values are at stake, that winning elections is the right way to win these battles, not procedural rules in the Senate. Unfortunately, procedural Senate moves are all we have today. Without those moves, there is no fight, only capitulation.

How can Democrats hope to convince Americans that their values are at stake if Democrats are unwilling to fight for those values? If Alito's nomination is a grave threat to values Democrats and American hold dear, how can Democrats not fight? If Democrats don't fight, only two conclusions can be drawn: either the battle was not important or Democrats can't be trusted with an important fight.

the alito hearings

I'm not and probably never will be a politician, and my instincts on this are probably all wrong, but while knowledgable folk like Kevin look for lines of constitutional inquiry that might have been more effective for the Democrats, I can't help wondering why no one pressed him on his insistence that he had an obligation not to answer meaningful questions. At times he refused to answer on the basis that he couldn't do so without a specific case to evaluate through the judicial process. At times he refused to answer because answering might commit him to judging in a specific way in cases likely to come before the Court.

There are a couple problems with these answers.

First, they're not consistent. If every case is distinct and can only be judged after considering the particulars, expressing opinions on general constitutional principles cannot prejudge any particular case. Until justices go through the judicial process, they presumably don't know which constitutional principles apply and to what extent. Without reference to a particular case, expressing opinions on Constitutional principles is not prejudging and does not commit the judge.

Second, as many have noted, justices express opinions all the time. It's their job. Scalia, Thomas, Sutter, et al have expressed opinions on issues likely to come before the Court many times, and will continue to do so. Alito has done so as an appelate judge. Members of the Court have expressed opinions in speeches, books, and articles. Before he was a judge, Alito expressed opinions as a government lawyer. Yet somehow, we're all supposed to accept that expressing opinions in response to the questions of the judiciary committee would compromise his judicial objectivity. I would like to have heard Alito explain why expressing opinions in public, before the people he will spend the rest of his life judging, prior to becoming a judge, was different.

It's a line of questioning that might not have been easy to deflect. He might, for example, have had a hard time asserting that he can't answer questions and asserting that he can't explain why. I would have enjoyed listening to him explain why only the public has no right to know, or trying to claim that he does not, in fact, have opinions on controversial matters of great public import. I would have enjoyed hearing him explain how the judicial process insulates his future judgements on the Supreme Court from the opinions he's expressed before, but not from opinions he expresses before a Senate committee. I would have enjoyed hearing him explain how keeping the public ignorant of a judge's deeply held views is equivalent to a judge not having deeply held views.

It might not have changed the outcome, but it would have been more edifying than what we had.

In his column on Gore's speech, David Broder writes of assigning malfeasance to the President's decision to go to war:

It is a reach to attempt to make a crime of a policy misjudgment.

Just a policy misjudgement. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Only in politics is fundamental incompetence a reason to keep one's job. The invasion and its aftermath demonstrated a willful pattern of subordinating policy formation to ideology. The adminstration even bragged about it: "We create reality, we don't respond to it." In any other position, such an attitude would put you on the street. If you're the President, the most respected voices in journalism will write the results off as a "policy misjudgement."

Lovely.

torture and national tragedy

Digby writes of torture and says:

At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them.

Everyone knows the world changed on 9/11, but it changed in different ways for different people. For me, 9/11 was the day I saw how weak our commitment to morality really was, how quickly we would sell our freedom, how quickly we would kill to make ourselves feel safer, how little we valued the lives of anyone not like ourselves. I thought back to all the years we'd spent lecturing the world on civil rights, morality, and the rule of law, then watched our government round up thousands of people on the barest of pretexts and hold them indefinitely.

And for what? 9/11 was a shocking event, tragic for all those involved. On a national scale, it was a small event. Our reaction to 9/11 has caused far more damage--political, economic, moral, loss of innocent life--than the event itself. If we were willing to inflict this much damage on ourselves after 3000 dead, how much would we sacrifice for 10,000?

the last abortion clinic

Last night, we watched a split screen TV. On one side of the screen, we watched Frontline on abortion access in the deep south. On the other, we watched election returns trickle in, with a measure restricting abortion starting out ahead before eventually falling behind. When we went to bed, Prop. 73 was behind by the narrowest of margins. It was a bit uncanny to watch the architects of abortion restrictions explain their strategy while watching their latest attempt play out in real time. We woke this morning to find that the measure had been defeated, and to read the comments of the measure's backers predicting that eventual success was inevitable.

I'd heard that access to abortion was difficult in some areas, but the Frontline report drove the point home in a way that mere knowing it did not. The fact that only one clinic in the state still provides second trimester abortions--and that that clinic is in danger of being regulated out of existence--was startling. The notion that Mississippi could have legislated all of its clinics out of existence, all without passing a single law that failed the "undue burden" test, was stunning. Perhaps there's a model there for other constitutional rights that make the majority uncomfortable. Instead of attacking the rights head-on, nibble at the edges with lots of small regulations. Make sure that the individual restrictions are so small that no one could reasonably claim that their elimination would threaten the right, but keep adding one small restriction after another, until the right no longer exists.

george bush, bleeding heart liberal

Apparently, Bush thinks accountability amounts to taking a class. What happened to the good old days? The mans's getting weak.

harrowing fiction

Shakespeare's Sister discusses passages from Scooter Libby's novel, and asks:

What kind of mind comes up with this shit, dreams up scenarios where children are raped by animals to train them in prostitution? Oh, right. A conservative one.

I'm pretty sure that conservatives don't have a monopoly on disturbing sadistic and sexual imagiry in fiction, and I'm pretty sure that the ability to dream up disturbing scenes for disturbing effect doesn't mean that the dreamer is disturbed.

Ignoring fiction for the moment, there is a thread in conservative political rhetoric of sexual and social armageddon, an implicit (or sometimes explicit) assumption that the only thing standing between us and the abyss of degradation is law. You see this when nationally syndicated pundits write that without the Law of the Bible, there would be no reason not to murder, that without tbe moral and legal condemnation of society, men couldn't help being seduced by the hedonism of the gay lifestyle. They say these things with such passion, such conviction, that it suggests personal experience, that they either know or are people for whom only strong, enforced law stands between them and dissolution.

I have talked to street corner evangelists, and heard their stories of being saved from hell in the here and now by adhering to God's Law, how they were weak and following the Law made them strong, and I have wondered about the strength of the desires they wrestled with before they found their source of strength, how strong those desires must still be, and I have seen the rage in their eyes when they see people living happy lives without denying themselves pleasures that the Law forbids. And I wonder how much they still want what they deny themselves, and how much that suppressed desire fuels their rage.