Paul Krugman is Super-SMRT, And Other Observations: a Long-Promised Fisking

His Krugman-ness in the NYT:

Mark Thoma sends us to the new Journal of Economic Perspectives paper(pdf) on optimal taxes by Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez. It’s a tough read (I’m still working on it myself), but there’s one discussion that I think helps make a useful point about current political debate.

Useful to whom?

In the first part of the paper, D&S analyze the optimal tax rate on top earners. And they argue that this should be the rate that maximizes the revenue collected from these top earners — full stop. Why? Because if you’re trying to maximize any sort of aggregate welfare measure, it’s clear that a marginal dollar of income makes very little difference to the welfare of the wealthy, as compared with the difference it makes to the welfare of the poor and middle class. So to a first approximation policy should soak the rich for the maximum amount — not out of envy or a desire to punish, but simply to raise as much money as possible for other purposes.

I was going to say "optimal for whom?" but Paulie K. kindly spells it out: the "optimal tax rate" is the optimal tax rate for the government. It maximizes the revenue of the state, and it's ability to engage in "other purposes." That phrase, however, is not so clear: what are these "other purposes"? How well are they performed? How well is that performance even measured? If the people decide that the government no longer needs to perform them, can they get their money back?

Smitty Fisks E.J. Dionne, So I don't have to...

His Tea Party paranoia grows apace.

Convenient text-table format, too.

E.J. Dionne Brims with Sound and Fury on Voter ID Issue, Signifies Nothing

I promised a Fisking, and yeah, a Fisking I shall deliver:

An attack on the right to vote is underway across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we’d condemn it as election-rigging. But it’s happening here, so there’s barely a whimper.

Right. Because when the corrupt regimes of "emerging democracies" steal elections, they do it by requiring people to identify themselves as residents and legal voters. Boss Tweed and Saddam Hussein loved that ruse.

Although I certainly consider the Left's whining on this subject to be "barely a whimper."

The laws are being passed in the name of preventing “voter fraud.” But study after study has shown that fraud by voters is not a major problem — and is less of a problem than how hard many states make it for people to vote in the first place. Some of the new laws, notably those limiting the number of days for early voting, have little plausible connection to battling fraud.

MSNBC's Lynn Mucken on High Gas Prices: Suck it Up, Proles.

This is a month old, but hardly past its Mock-By date, especially for this web site. Out come the Fisking Shears:

It's my new thing.

If It Bleeds, It Bores

Unlike E.J. Dionne, I don't have any particular animus against Eric Goldstein. But his column of today is bizarre to me, strangley formulaic and and bereft of real argument. So I'm going to fisk it, if for no other reason than to keep my claws sharp.

A Tunisian revolution that's more bloody than jasmine

What a powerful headline! So challenging in its assertions, so evocative in its construction, so tasty the bourbon at the hotel bar!

Micheal Moore, Health Care: The Fisking (A Zombie Post from March 2010)

[Editors Note: I've been cleaning out the old blog today, adding tags, deleting drafts that would never see the light of day, when I stumbled upon this. God only knows why I got this far and never finished it. I was faced with either deleting it or getting rid of it. And for some reason I cannot choose to un-fisk Michael Moore. I just can't quit the big fat bastard]

Because.

To My Fellow Citizens, the Republicans:

Say, what you will about the man, he loves him some schtick. And he loves no schtick like the "Phoney Politeness" schtick.

We're Poor! How Can You Think of Spending Less Money? A News Fisking RE-POST

[despite numerous attempts at editing, the original version of this post kept getting jumbled. So I'm trying again. Wish me luck.]

The Hill (h/t Protein Wisdom):

Representatives of three liberal advocacy groups on Monday blasted President Obama’s proposed two-year freeze on federal civilian worker pay.

And by "blasted" the gang at The Hill undoubtedly mean "made a series of fatuous and unsurprising comments about. Hey, you try making this shit interesting."

Super-Heroes and Machismo are Bad, Says Female Psychologist

Prepare the estrogen bath, boys:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 15, 2010) — Watching superheroes beat up villains may not be the best image for boys to see if society wants to promote kinder, less stereotypical male behaviors, according to psychologists who spoke Sunday at the 118th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

And how if society would like to keep a bit of stereotypical male behavior around? I mean, just in a glass case, for when terrorists attack and such? Not anyplace where it might get on the new drapes, God forbid.

E.J. Dionne Merits Another Fisking...

...insert your own joke here.

Lithwick on Alito: A Fisking

It's been a while since I revved one of these up, and I do enjoy it.

The Dangling Conversation The one-sided "debate" about judges. By Dahlia Lithwick Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2005, at 2:12 PM ET

Of all the criticisms of Harriet Miers, the one I found most perplexing was that some Senators felt she spoke too quietly. Her murder boards were going badly, in part because she was a whisperer. Forgive me, but what the hell? She wasn't auditioning for the lead in Annie. She was applying for a job largely composed of reading and writing. I have heard a total of 30 words emanate from the mouth of Clarence Thomas in six years covering the court.

I followed the link Lithwick offers, and the word "quiet" appears precisely once, and is not attributed to any Senator by name, but does explain that the Senator in question couldn't hear Miers' statements and had to ask the people in the hall to shut up. The rest of the article quotes objections to the Miers nomination that includes words such as "gravitas," "underwhelming," "incomplete" and even "insulting." I know reporters aren't used to taking people at their word, but this seems a silly beginning to hang your screed on.

It occurred to me only in hindsight that there was a reason Miers' tiny voice was such an issue: Conservatives wanted to use these confirmation hearings as infomercials for their views on the proper role of judges in America. The soft-spoken Miers wouldn't have moved any product. The John Roberts hearing was, and the Sam Alito hearing will be, Justice Sunday III—the church service/call-to-arms staged by demagogues on the far right. Except these hearings are carried live on C-SPAN, broadcast nationwide, and blessed by the Senate.

You think I am overstating matters? You're not reading the right op-eds. Here is Ned Rice at the National Review Online, scorning Miers as a nominee: "Let's name someone to the Supreme Court whose nomination is guaranteed to trigger a national conversation on the proper role of the judiciary—it can only help the conservative cause. Let's demand that Judge Bork be allowed to take his case against judicial activism directly to the American people."

My God! People of a particular political philosophy desiring that their ideas be given an opportunity to persuade the people! Such perfidy cannot stand!

And here is George Will: "This is the debate the country has needed for several generations: Should the Constitution be treated as so plastic, so changeable that it enables justices to reach whatever social outcomes—'results'—they, like the result-oriented senators who confirm them, consider desirable?" Here is Joe Mariani: "Taking a Mulligan—a golf term for 'undoing' a poor shot—on Harriet Miers gives President Bush an opportunity to launch a public relations offensive with his base solidly behind him. … [I]f the President nominates a strong originalist like Sam Alito, Janice Rogers Brown, Michael Luttig or Edith Hollan Jones, we can finally have that national conversation about judicial activism and tyranny the Left has been dreading for decades."
The italics are mine. But there is, it would seem, a national conversation going on, though it is a conversation in which most of us are not participating. The same devoted right-wingers who torpedoed the Miers nomination are frothing at the mouth

I beg your pardon. No one is frothing at anything. People are eager to make an argument. We are still permitted such by the 1st Amendment, yes? It's not 60 days before a national election.

to explain painstakingly to the nation—yet again—their theory of judging. Liberals believe that the object of these hearings is to find out what a nominee stands for.

And then, when these ideas fail to pass the litmus test that everyone pretends is not there, "torpedo"-ing the nomination. No word yet on whether they froth at the mouth.

But conservatives have long understood that the real point is a mass public-relations effort to drive home their lasting, unitary view of all liberal or even moderate judges as reckless and overreaching.

I'm fairly certain that no such words were uttered during the Roberts confirmation. But then, it's hard to follow ever quote when the loyal opposition's blather renders one doubled-over with laughter or unconcious.

The net effect of the John Roberts hearings was a national four-day "civics lesson" in which the populace heard, again and again, that any approach to judging other than "modesty" and "minimalism" would result in judges making things up as they go along.

Um, no. The net effect of the Roberts hearing was that Roberts became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I'm still confused as to why Lithwick objects to politicians and judicial appointees discussing the proper approach to exercising judicial power. Aren't senatorial hearings supposed to function as "civics lessons"?

That's a page from the far right's talking points.

Only the far right? No one on the moderate right? Does a "moderate right" exist in Lithwick's imagination? Or is that term only applied, as Mark Steyn noted to the less psychotic mullahs of Iran?

No competing vision emerged from the left, as far as I could tell.

Say, there's a surprise.

I won't credit the efforts of the Democrats on the judiciary committee to see into John Roberts' heart, or probe whether his kids play soccer with poor immigrant children, as efforts to put forth a competing jurisprudence. Those questions were clumsy proxies for the clumsy theory that judges should just fix life for sad people.

Um, isn't that what liberals want?

I am calling for something else. It's time for Senate Democrats to recognize that a) there is a national conversation about the role of judges now taking place; and that b) thanks to their weak efforts, it's not a conversation—it's a monologue.

That's funny, I could swear all the monologuing was being done by Senate Democrats in the aforementioned efforts to see into Roberts' heart. The guy hardly got a word in edgeways. Who was it that was doing all this yapping about judicial restraint? I mean, besides the frothing far-right conservative ideologues slamming their torpedoes into Miers (anyone else waiting for an accusation of "ideological rape" or some such by the sob-sister crowd)?

Partisans on both sides are eagerly setting one another's hair on fire,

Perhaps this explains the frothing. Or maybe they just need to froth a little higher?

deconstructing every word of every opinion Sam Alito ever penned. Trust me—my hate mail is staggering. But the substance of Alito's writings is a distraction from the main event.

Observe as our intrepid guide shows us the real plan at work.

In truth, conservatives cannot wait for Round 2 of this next civics lesson, a lesson that will star Sam Alito—a charming, articulate, card-carrying conservative jurist with an evolved and plausible-sounding legal theory.

If you're not frothing at the eeeeeeevil being perpetrated here, you obviously aren't reading the right op-eds. Do you see what the bastards are up to! Why, they'll stop at nothing! They'll even nominate charming, articulate men with evolved and plausible theories! Can the Republic ever survive?

It will, unless Democrats get it together, become yet another Jerry Lewis telethon,

Sister, you need to make up your mind. Either the Democrats are selling maudlin and sentimental gush as deep thought, or the Republicans are. Last I looked, Barbara Boxer was not a Republican.

raising national awareness about the dangers of "judicial activism" and the plague of "the reckless overreaching of out-of-touch liberal elitist judges." Democrats in the Senate either will not or cannot put the lie to these trite formulations. They need to shout it from the rooftops: that blithely striking down acts of Congress is activism; that the right's hero Clarence Thomas may be the most activist judge on the current court; that reversing or eroding long-settled precedent is also activism; and that "legislating from the bench" happens as frequently from the right as the left.

There are many words I would use to describe Clarence Thomas, but "blithe" is not one of them. And who ever said that acts of Congress couldn't be made void by the Supreme Court? That is what the Supreme Court is for. What is coming under attack by conservatives is the Court setting a particular public policy goal and man-handling the Constitution by whatever means to get there. The chief criticism of Roe vs. Wade as a decision is that it involved the federal government in an area where the federal government does not belong, and invented a Constitutional right that, if anything, was covered by the Tenth Amendment. That is what is meant by "legislating from the bench." The Supreme Court isn't there to re-write the Constitution to say what it thinks would be best for us all of us to say. It's there to guard it.

Part of this woeful unpreparedness is the result of something we've discussed before—the sinking fear on the part of some progressives that the right's criticisms are somehow legitimate.

Thoughtcrime! Thoughtcrime! Thoughtcrime!

Maybe Roe was judicial overreaching; maybe there is no principled theory for what liberal jurists do.

Is this sarcasm or not? I really can't tell.

Part of the left's program is that any principled theory for what liberal jurists do is complicated.

That's the best way to convince people that you aren't an elitist: say that your ideas are "complicated".

There's no cheap sound bite for Justice Stephen Breyer's notion of "active liberty" or for Cass Sunstein's program of judicial "minimalism" or Jack Balkin's principled "centrism." Or perhaps there is a cheap sound bite embedded in those ideas—it simply hasn't been excavated yet.

Um, wouldn't "active liberty", "judicial minimalism", or "principled centrism" be the sound bites?

Incidentally, I followed the links, and discovered the following:

• Justice Breyers does not explain in the interview linked just what "active liberty" means. But he does admit that the charge that unelected judges making decisions that should be left to the people is "a good criticism, not a bad criticism, even if I disagree with it in particular cases."
• Cass Sunstein says that the courts should let "public debates stay in the political realm, rather than the court providing broad, sweeping judgments on contentious issues," and that "even if they rely on their own deepest convictions, they may make mistakes like Dred Scott." (Doesn't this sound like an argument for repealing Roe?)
• Jack Balkin makes a fair argument that even those who claim to be originalists are inconsistent about applying that theory. But his basic premise: that following originalism would destroy everything we have achieved, is frankly, malarkey. He himself writes that "In the long run, the Supreme Court has helped secure greater protection for civil rights and civil liberties not because judges are smarter or nobler, but because the American people have demanded it." As conservatives have countlessly stated, the end result of striking down decisions like Roe depends entirely on what the people would do in its aftermath. To state on the one hand that civil-liberty guaruntees are dependent on the "living constitution" and to state on the other that the are the result of what the people have decided they want is an attempt to have your cake and eat it, too.

The main attraction of the right wing's relentless attack on the judiciary is that its oversimplified theory of judicial restraint solves its oversimplified problem of unconstrained judges. You have to drill down a lot deeper to see that unconstrained judges are making mischief at either end of the political spectrum, and more urgently, that hogtying judges is not an end in itself. It's a means to an end—with the end, I suppose, being the packing of the courts with judges who say they believe in restraint even as they gleefully dismantle decades' worth of legislative and judicial progress.

But if this "progress" was based on an abuse of judicial power, would not someone who believes in "restraint" want to correct that trend? Again, what we oppose is the re-writing of the Constitution. It's hardly inconsistent to want to edit out what has been improperly added.

The point here is not that Democrats must—between today and the start of the Alito hearings—pull together a well-worked-out global vision of constitutional interpretation.

Wait, weren't you just saying that they already had these global visions? And that they were complicated?

They do, however, need to enter into this "national conversation" about the role of judges with a more evolved doctrine than: "Judge Alito, would you cry if your puppy died?"

Only if the puppy was rabid, one presumes, and thus, frothing at the mouth (I'll stop now).

In his wonderful book, Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America, Cass Sunstein lays out four alternative theories of constitutional interpretation and concludes that judicial minimalism is the surest and most principled path. Senate Democrats should commit to memory the parade of horribles Sunstein lists as following from the fundamentalist project (he means fundamentalism not in the religious sense but in terms of rigid adherence to original intent). If the Scalias, Thomases, Alitos, and Borks of the world had their way, he says, there would be no meaningful gun control. States could have official churches. Hard-fought federal worker, environmental, and civil rights protections would disintegrate. What you currently think of as the right to privacy would disappear.

Again, only if the people wanted them too, and got the legislatures to so instruct. If these things are so popular, then there's nothing stopping the Constitution from being amended to include them. But then the Constitution will say it, clearly, and there's no need for us to argue further on the subject.

Incidentally, I wasn't aware that there was any "meaningful gun control."

These are the questions Senate Democrats need to ask of Sam Alito: Should property rights trump individual rights? Should the right to privacy be interpreted as narrowly as the framers might have intended? Do you believe that a return to the morals and mores of two centuries ago is in the best interest of this nation?

It doesn't matter what he answers, indeed the answers are irrelevant.

Oh, of course they are. Because once you ask the questions, the raw, primal truth of them will cause any who hold incorrect answers to spontaneously implode and collapse in a puff of logic, like Sauron at the end of Return of the King. Think Lithwick's been watching The American President again?

By posing these questions to the American people, the senators will give them some understanding of the America that stands to be dismantled. What matters now is injecting an alternative voice into this conversation. To start talking, before the conversation passes us by altogether.

And that would be lovely. Because it might involve something other than the tendentious use of terms like "far-right," "out-of-the-mainstream," and "radical" and offer something like an argument for why the liberal understanding of constitutional jurisprudence should stand. Which is exactly what all the frothing conservatives want.

Madonna: the Gag That Keeps On Giving

We were hoping that Her Pretentiousness would grace us with a response to those who've been mocking her these past several weeks. Well the God she worships evidently exists, because our prayers have been answered. A few excerpts:

[S]he says her motivation for recording such an album wasn't simply to make fun music again, or even to shore up her wobbly recording career.

Instead, it seems, she wanted to, ahem, help mankind.

"It's that old cliché," Madonna explains, "when the world gets you down, you need to be lifted up. Look at the state of the world. People need to be inspired and happy."

The justification for all sappy music and bad TV, delivered with the pomposity of an adjunct professor of sociology. It just doesn't get any better than this.

Back then, the singer made a very un-Madonna-like move by withdrawing her controversial video for "American Life," which equated Bush with Saddam Hussein. Now she asserts that the only reason she yanked the video was "because I was worried for my children. I saw what happened with the Dixie Chicks. I didn't want people to throw rocks at [my kids] on the way to school."

Maybe I've been drinking the wrong Kool-Aid, but I don't remember anyone stoning the Dixie Chicks, and I've been waiting for someone to stone the Dixie Chicks for some time, because of their wack middlebrow countrified pop, not their politics. I'm pretty sure that all the Dixie Chicks had to put up with was some fan backlash. Anyone want to set me straight?

The new documentary contrasts tellingly with the old one. In "Truth or Dare," Madonna comes off as a flip and provocative fun-time gal. This time she says things like, "Sometimes fun is overrated."

While "Truth" painted her as an outrageous Lady Madonna, "Secret" reveals her to be a cross between Joan Baez and a singing-dancing Mother Teresa in training.

Sometimes fun is overrated, she says. Not rebellion. Not naughtiness. FUN.

Methinks the commenter on Boxing Alcibiades was correct when he suggested that Madonna was going to be a Catholic again in a few years. And hardcore, at that.

"Obviously, my tastes and my priorities have changed," she says. "But I am still asking the question 'Why?' Just because I'm a mother doesn't mean I'm not still a rebel...

Actually, Kato, that's exactly what it means. Rebellion is, or ought to be, dangerous work. If unsuccessful, it invites suppression by the Man, and if successful, leads to a vacuum of power that often kills its parents (just ask Danton). Those who have no one to leave behind are best suited to engaging in such. Those with children ought to have pause about the larger consequences of their actions. It's called responsibility.

Of course, this assumes a world where earning the title of "rebel" involves something a bit more risky than performing the epater le bourgeois routine for cash. So maybe she's right.

"It's not conservative," she says. "It's actually very punk-rock to not watch TV."

Because when I think "punk rock", I think "Madonna". Only in her world would being the movie girlfriend of Richard Hell make one an authority on music whose clothes she copied but never played. If the Bee Gees tried to tell us what was punk rock, we'd crucify them, but this silly disco granny gets taken seriously. As the Kabbalists say, OY.

But let Madonna talk long enough about pop-culture excess, and she ends up sounding not wildly dissimilar to Pat Robertson. "It's very surface-oriented and of the moment and disposable," she says. "You have to constantly up the ante. [Celebrities] just have to keep getting more extreme to get attention. It's crap. It's scary. We are obviously creating our own demise."

Eeyow! Are things that bad?

"Look at the world we live in," says Madonna, yet again.

Uh-huh. And she contributed to NONE of this. The woman who made bland, chirpy pop tunes that you could dance to about heartbreak and....more heartbreak; the woman who made a cottage industry out of offering substanceless shock disguised as deep thinking; the woman who famously made out with two of her copycats on national television is completely and utterly innocent of adding to a culture that is "surface-oriented and of the moment and disposable." Is there no one around her with an irony meter?

Where's that Belgian pie-thrower when you need him?

In reaction to this excess, the singer has spent more and more time exploring the inner life through her faith. The shift has inspired more hostility toward her than anything in years.

"It would be less controversial if I joined the Nazi Party," Madonna says of the kabbala.

Um, no. If Madonna joined the Nazi Pary, every American of conscience would denounce her from the highest soapbox, her career would swirl the drain with the rapidity of an American Idol winner, and we'd pack her off to England with hardly a memory. Joining Kabbalah has made her merely eccentric and subject to some of Leno and Letterman's lamer jokes.

Is there no one around her who's heard of Godwin's Law?

A song on the new album titled "Isaac," which uses Jewish musical motifs, has outraged some kabbalist rabbis. They claim the song is about Isaac (or Yitzhak) Luria, a 16th-century Jewish mystic. "Jewish law forbids the use of the name of the holy rabbi for profit," Rabbi Rafael Cohen, who heads a seminary named after Luria, said in a statement.

Madonna insists that her song is not about Luria at all but about Yitzhak Sinwani, who sings on the track. "They're saying I'm committing a blasphemy, but that's not what the song is about," she says. "What are they doing commenting on pop songs? Don't they have synagogues to pray in?"

So Madonna, Holy Madonna, Madonna our Redemptorix can mix the world of religion and pop and scoff at those who haven't the imagination to follow her, but anyone else with a different perspective should stay in the temple and shut up. I feel enlightened just being in her presence.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously pithed that American Lives have no second acts. Madonna clearly doesn't believe this, which may be why she moved to England. But you can't have a second act until you pull the curtain down on the first one, which she is completely unwilling to do. And the longer she fails to do it, the more her fate as an entre'act spectacle, slipping in on the gag reel, is assured. And for someone like me, whose hated the woman since I first had to listen to shrill renderings of "Papa Don't Preach" by neighborhood girls, that will be a joy eternal.

Sorry for being gone. Here's a fisking.

In my college days, my folks used to get the Washington Post delivered. I used to get yelled at for reading the paper before my father did, but read it anyway I did. But I was selective in my reading: the editorial page. After the Post's nauseating coverage of the '96 conventions (rapturously fulsomizing for two days over the Clinton's choice of Atlanta before the convention, relegating the Republican convention to an insert on the bottom of the front page), I determined that if I was going to read Democratic political commentary, I was going to read the stuff that was up-front about it.

Nowadays, of course, I find the Post to be perhaps the best newspaper in the country, and certainly the best left-leaning one. It regularly outshines the New York Times in fairness and accuracy. It's still a Democratic paper, and unabashed about it, but its integrity as a news organization has not, to my knowledge, been significantly compromised.

It's columnists, of course, are another story. The Post's editorial page is generally one of the fairest in the business, a roughly 60-40 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. Of the Democrats, William Raspberry is always a good, genial read, Richard Cohen is cheap and tedious, and Colbert King reminds me of an
Enlightenment-era monarch, full of a sense of his own importance, constantly reminding us by his very presence of ages long past, and in the end, he says nothing (I'm not going to bother about Anne Applebaum and Ellen Goodman, because, it pains me greatly to say, I can't remember a word they've written).

But E.J. Dionne, now there's an apparatchik worth letting loose a Fisk on. You can accept this as my statement on the judicial mess as well:

'Watch Those Guys'

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005; Page A17

No one was more relieved last night by the deal that avoided the end of Senate's right to filibuster judicial nominees than Arlen Specter.

I imagine that somehow this is intended to be relevatory, as though the known universe were unaware that Specter is a squish who'd sooner eat goat entrails than make a decision between one side or another. We're talking about a guy who, given the choice between saying "Guilty" and "Not Guilty" said "They haven't proved it," just to make sure his rear was covered.

The senior Republican senator from Pennsylvania began his political life revering John F. Kennedy and proudly declared himself a "Kennedy Democrat." The foundation of his career was the idea of checks and balances.

"Checks and balances," you say? I am intrigued. Tell me more of these plucky "checks and balances." I failed high school civics and have no idea wherefrom such a concept might have fallen.

In the late 1960s, Specter decided that party loyalty could ask too much. Despite his Democratic leanings, he accepted the Republican nomination for district attorney in Philadelphia. He was running against a Democratic machine that was, as Specter once put it, "highly suspect if not demonstrably corrupt."

Still is. Philadelphia is one of the worst-run cities on the East Coast. It makes Boston look like the New Jerusalem. The Democratic machine is as entrenched, and as powerful, now as it was then. So Specter appears to have accomplished nothing by this bold crossing of the aisle except getting his name in the papers.

Along with Tom Gola, a legendary basketball star whom the Republicans ran for city comptroller, Specter argued that the citizens of Philadelphia desperately needed the minority party to have some power to curb the abuses of the majority.

Their brilliant slogan, one of my favorites: "We need these guys to watch those guys."

Imagine what might have been if he had decided to say "We need these guys in power, so they can do what's right." This might not have been immediately possible, given the circumstances of Philly politics. But building on this momentum might have led to a growing of the party's base and an actual choice in governance, instead of the one-party kleptocracy the city is today. But Specter's wouldn't be interested in that.

There could be no better argument for preserving judicial filibusters. That's why a substantial group of Republicans led by Sen. John McCain joined with moderate Democrats last night in a compromise that will keep the right to filibuster alive.

The "right to filibuster." Oh, isn't that just what we need? Dark were the days for our most powerful legislators, until the Right to Filibuster was preserved by the brace, the few, the Specters of Truth!

Senators of the World, UNITE!!!

The "nuclear option" was a problem not only because it meant reducing the power of Senate Democrats

Heaven Forfend.

but also because it substantially reduced the ability of the Senate as a whole to challenge presidential judicial appointees. That capacity gives the Senate, currently the most middle-of-the-road of the elected branches of the federal government, the ability to exercise a moderating influence on the president's judicial choices.

All of this would be fine if I perceived the need for the President's judicial choices to be moderated, if I saw a threat they presented. I've never heard a Democrat put forward a cogent argument that detailed what was wrong with the President's picks. They've been described as "extreme," "right-wing," "theocratic" and so on. What I haven't heard is why they shouldn't be judges. Surely, in a world where "we need these guys to watch those guys," a few origonal constructionists in a judiciary full of penumbra-expanders would be a welcome, even moderating influence?


Apparently not.

The nuclear option to blow away the minority's rights promised a huge and unprecedented expansion of presidential control over the judiciary. The Republican compromisers decided that they needed to exercise some control over "those guys" in the White House. They also know they will welcome such influence when the Democrats take back the White House, as they will some day.

Did the President have "unprecedented control over the judiciary" in the days before Clinton when Senates, as a rule passed all but a few of a President's nominees? Or was the judiciary, selected by the President within a select set of parameters, and passed by the Senate provided they weren't completely imbecilic, a truly independent branch of government, as it was intended to be?


Is the establishment of a 60-vote supermajority to pass any judicial nominee not an unprecedented expansion of senatorial control over the judiciary?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and other Republicans who backed the nuclear option hurt themselves badly with shameful rhetoric suggesting that murder and mayhem, not honest differences, were at the heart of this battle.

Yes, "shameful rhetoric" always costs senators votes. That's why Ted Kennedy's career in the Senate was so brief.

Thus did Frist accuse the Democrats of wanting to "kill, to defeat, to assassinate" President Bush's nominees. Oh, my. That's what comes out when a Princeton graduate plays the role of counterfeit populist in pandering to the Christian right.

And this is what comes out when a Beltway journalist can't fathom the possibility that a two-term President whose party controls Congress might nominate people whose ideas resonate with a sizable section of the public. The formula is so typical as to be cliche: speak out on the need to soak the rich = "authentic" populism. Speak out on cultural issues that play in Peoria = "counterfeit" populism.

Someone be a sport and tell E.J. that there's a thing called character assassination. If the concept confuses him, he can ask Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to elucidate on the subject.

Frist is waging this fight because he wants to be president and needs support from social conservatives.

Number of words between E.J.'s backhanded comment that there were "honest differences" on the side of the Democrats and his cynical determination that Frist is merely building up an exploratory committee: 39, including the "a's" and "the's".

That's hutzpah, my friends.

Then there was the comment from the other Republican senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum. Senate debates routinely produce tortured metaphors. But in arguing that Democrats had no right to demand that Republicans follow the standard rules in changing the Senate's filibuster procedures, Santorum hit new heights of weirdness.

Here's what Santorum said: "The audacity of some members to stand up and say, 'How dare you break this rule,' that's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city. It's mine.' This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster."

Huh?

History lesson time: in 1940 Germany took over Paris, by invading the country. The Allies later disputed the Nazi occupation of France, and I'm assuming bombing was involved. The analogy works like this: People cannot claim legitimacy by historical tradition for something that has been recently established. Thus, the "nuclear option" was aimed at the Democratic supermajority, which, as I previously pointed out, is not part of Senate tradition.

Now, can a great big Brookings Institute fellow understand that?

Santorum later insisted that his words were "meant to dramatize the principle of an argument, not to characterize my Democratic colleagues." Gee, thanks for that.

Why, the impertinence of the thing! The next thing you know, people will start comparing the President to Hitler!

Oh, yes, and although he is not a senator, Pat Robertson certainly speaks for the constituency to which Bill Frist was pandering.

And Micheal Moore speaks for the constituency to which Harry Reid is "pandering," if "pandering" means "agree with" and "speaks for" means "belongs to roughly the same political coalition as."

Don't you love it? Two Senators out of 100, and on we are to Pat Robertson, who's said another dumb thing. This is selective quoting with a vengeance.

The deal is not perfect. There are grounds to worry that the federal judiciary will be dominated at the end of the Bush years by a certain style of conservative -- Janice Rogers Brown is representative -- ready to roll back the New Deal jurisprudence of the last 70 years. Many who buy this legal approach preach that federal rules on wages and hours, environmental and business regulation, should be overturned by courts that would use 19th-century standards to void Washington's capacity to create rational standards for a complex 21st-century economy. Stopping such a judicial takeover would justify filibusters.

Press Summary: "The deal is not perfect. It allows people who have different viewpoints to become judges. That's bad, mmkay?"

Snark aside, at least Dionne had an objection to Brown that didn't involve the a-word, and for that he should be commended. It allows the question of whether 70 years of New Deal jurisprudence has been good for anything other than keeping certain aspects of our economy mired in the 1970's to be debated. But it still sounds too much like an insistence that the judiciary be monolithic, while the political branches be partisan.

It also underlines the degree to which Democrats have become the country's real conservatives. Back when Specter was switching parties, the argument of 70 years of tradition was the last thing any self-respecting Democrat would have respected. Now, it's routinely trotted out as a weapon against any of Bush's proposals, from Social Security to ANWR. None of them seem to realize that such an argument gives off the impression that they have no other arguments to fall back on.

Fisking Michael Moore

I do this because I'm a mean Republican who hates, and hates, and desires nothing more than to increase the degree of suffering in those I have arbitrarily decided are my enemies, and to hear the lamentations of their women. Also because I'm about to tie my post-per-day record.



The original article is here, in USATODAY.



The GOP doesn't reflect America




In point of fact, it porously absorbs America into itself, only to wring itself out again, and then to rub suds of America all over the Kitchen of Freedom, and oh, I've gone cross-eyed...



Michael Moore, Filmmaker



NEW YORK — Welcome, Republicans. You're proud Americans who love your country. In your own way, you want to make this country a better place. Whatever our differences, you should be commended for that.




Sounds almost sincere, don't he? I'm sure in some way he thinks he is, and doesn't see any form of condescension in this.




But what's all this talk about New York being enemy territory? Nothing could be further from the truth. We New Yorkers love Republicans. We have a Republican mayor and governor, a death penalty and two nuclear plants within 30 miles of the city.




I'm glad to see Moore is falling away from the usual "Republicans are Hick Aliens in Boffo, Socko NYC" routine. Good for him. But perhaps he'd like to explain how nuclear power is a strictly Republican issue. Or perhaps he'd like to explain where these two plants he refers to are. I went looking for nuclear plants in the NYC area, found this site, but couldn't find any plants within thirty miles. The closest one was in Buchanan, NY, and that's 46 miles away. The next closest one is in Forked River, NJ (81 miles), which would not seem to have anything to do with the Republicanism of New Yorkers. Maybe he means the Secret Halliburton Plants that have been built with money from the Saudis, the North Koreans, and the Freemasons.


As for the death penalty, it was re-instituted under Republican Governor George Pataki. But it was first de-instituted under Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller. One may argue that it's Republicans who support the Death Penalty more vigorously than democrats do, but public opinion polls have shown widespread support for capital punishment in every year since 1972. Presumably, that includes some Democrats.




New York is home to Fox News Channel. The top right-wing talk shows emanate from here — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly among them. The Wall Street Journal is based here, which means your favorite street is here. Not to mention more Fortune 500 executives than anywhere else.



You may think you're surrounded by a bunch of latte-drinking effete liberals, but the truth is, you're right where you belong, smack in the seat of corporate America and conservative media.




New York is home to every news Channel, and hosts most nationwide radio programs. Even PBS has an office in New York. That proves nothing. Surely Moore isn't arguing that every Fortune 500 exec is a Republican. Quick someone get the memo to Warren Buffet!




Let me also say I admire your resolve. You're true believers. Even though only a third of the country defines itself as "Republican," you control the White House, Congress, Supreme Court and most state governments.




Dare one ask, how that happened? Did we Reps, driven by our resolve, simply walk into the political branches of government one day, like student radicals did to President's offices in the 60's, and refuse to leave?


Or did the voters put them there, in spite of the fact that we're only a third of the country? Maybe we aren't a third of the voters?




You're in charge because you never back down.




That's funny, I could swear that I've read guys at NRO attribute the same character trait to the Democrats. Either one side is wrong, or, now bear with me here, both sides find the stubborn refusal of the other side to say "Gosh! You're Right!" incredibly irritating. Maybe that impression shouldn't be used as argument.




Your people are up before dawn figuring out which minority group shouldn't be allowed to marry today.



That's why today (but never before, mind you) we don't allow gays, tommorrow we won't allow asians, thursday it'll be the blind, and to kick of the weekend, just to be crazy, we won't let ourselves do it. It's called "strategery."




Our side is full of wimps who'd rather compromise than fight. Not you guys.



I can only guess this is sarcasm. If so, where's the kicker? Is the statement so ludicrous that it refutes itself? Or is the magic and holy word "compromise" what elevates your side?


I guess you'd prefer to compromise with the Saudis that you think are the real villains behind 9-11. Good luck with that.




Hanging out around the convention, I've encountered a number of the Republican faithful who aren't delegates. They warm up to me when they don't find horns or a tail. Talking to them, I discover they're like many people who call themselves Republicans but aren't really Republicans. At least not in the radical-right way that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Co. have defined Republicans.




And again, the reason that these non-Republicans are here to nominate a radical-right Republican is...?




I asked one man who told me he was a "proud Republican," "Do you think we need strong laws to protect our air and water?"



"Well, sure," he said. "Who doesn't?"



I asked whether women should have equal rights, including the same pay as men.



"Absolutely," he replied.



"Would you discriminate against someone because he or she is gay?"



"Um, no." The pause — I get that a lot when I ask this question — is usually because the average good-hearted person instantly thinks about a gay family member or friend.



So you ask a "proud Republican" three questions and discover that he desires clean air and water, favors equal rights for women, and is not a slavering homophobe. What do you conclude? That Republicans want the same things as the rest of us, and just disagree on the details? Noooooo...you conclude that this person, his claims to the contrary, obviously can't BE a Republican!




I've often found that if I go down the list of "liberal" issues with people who say they're Republican, they are quite liberal and not in sync with the Republicans who run the country. Most don't want America to be the world's police officer and prefer peace to war.




See? Since EVERYONE KNOWS that Republicans are warmongering savages who'd bomb a third-world nation as soon as look at them, people who think peace is better than war are OBVIOUSLY not Republicans! Why, it's so simple!




They applaud civil rights,



And here's more proof. Republicans never support civil rights. We must therefore conclude that Lincoln, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and all the Republican congressmen who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, were, in fact, not Republicans.


Who was a Republican? Maybe...Woodrow Wilson...?




believe all Americans should have health insurance



And I think no American should have health insurance. Nope, none. That'll solve the problem...muhuhahahahahaha!


I don't suppose Mikey asked these people if they think the way to give all Americans health insurance is for the federal government to pay for it.




and think assault weapons should be banned. Though they may personally oppose abortion, they usually don't think the government has the right to tell a women what to do with her body.



Here's where I want Mike to show me his questionairre, and maybe reveal just how large his sample was. A lot of people who are opposed to "gun control" will say that they don't like "assault weapons," but I find it difficult to believe that he covered a wide swath of Republicans and met no NRA members. Likewise, no National Right-to-Life members.


Sure, it's very likely that there are plenty of Republicans who don't mind gun control and who don't mind abortion. As regards the latter issue, Republicans are a bit less doctrinaire than the other guys, as the careers of Pataki, Guiliani, and Schwarzenegger show. But when Moore claims that these views constitute the majority, I just don't believe him.




There's a name for these Republicans: RINOs or Republican In Name Only. They possess a liberal, open mind and don't believe in creating a worse life for anyone else.



Ideology is is an amazing thing. It renders someone capable of writing a sentence like that and not perceiving how utterly fatuous it is.



So why do they use the same label as those who back a status quo of women earning 75 cents to every dollar a man earns, 45 million people without health coverage and a president who has two more countries left on his axis-of-evil-regime-change list?



Hold the phone a second. Name me one instance where anyone in the GOP has said that women making less than men (which is a statistic I've always found specious, but that's an argument for another day), or that 45 million people without health coverage is a GOOD THING. Sit down for five seconds, breathe into a paper bag and allow this thought to cross your mind: MAYBE THEY JUST DON'T THINK MY SOLUTION WILL DO ANY GOOD OR IS WORTH THE COST.


And I seriously doubt that your conversations with these supposed "RINO's" led you to think that they disapproved of Bush' Axis-of-Evil Diplomacy. Hell, most Republicans I know favor P.J. O'Rourke's solution to Middle Eastern Conflict: "raze buildings, burn crops, sow the earth with salt, and sell the population into bondage," especially after a sufficient number of alcoholic beverages. Then they usually sober up and decide that giving Arab countries democracy so they can argue with one another instead of the rest of the world is the preferable alternative. If Mikey had asked anybody whether they supported removing Saddam Hussein from power, I'll bet he would have found a connection between the straw hats and Dubya.




I asked my friend on the street. He said what I hear from all RINOs: "I don't want the government taking my hard-earned money and taxing me to death. That's what the Democrats do."



Money. That's what it comes down to for the RINOs. They do work hard and have been squeezed even harder to make ends meet. They blame Democrats for wanting to take their money. Never mind that it's Republican tax cuts for the rich and billions spent on the Iraq war that have created the largest deficits in history and will put all of us in hock for years to come.



Because we weren't all in hock before that. Clinton balanced the budget for a few years (well, him and the presumably all-RINO opposition that, through rigid party discipline even though they know they don't agree with the leadership, somehow got voted into control of Congress), and that solved all our budget problems. The fact that prior to the Clinton years we hadn't had a balanced budget since the Johnson Administration (and that a weasely one) wasn't going to do us any financial damage, noooo....




The Republican Party's leadership knows America is not only filled with RINOs, but most Americans are much more liberal than the delegates gathered in New York.



How can that be, Mike? You've established that the delegates are all eco-friendly, gender-neutral, non-gay-hating, pro-civil-rights, pro-health-insurance-for-all, pro-gun-control, pro-choice, "normal" folk. I thought they were "quite" liberal.




The Republicans know it. That's why this week we're seeing gay-loving Rudy Giuliani, gun-hating Michael Bloomberg and abortion-rights advocate Arnold Schwarzenegger.



The fact that Guiliani was a national figure before 9/11, a celebrity afterwards, and the former mayor of the city where the convention is taking place; that Bloomberg is the current mayor of the city where the convention is taking place; that Schwarzenegger is a worldwide celebrity and the man who unseated the governor of the largest state in the Union by an unheard-of recall vote has nothing to do with it.


One might also keep in mind the fact that John McCain, who cannot fairly be described as gay-loving, gun-hating, or an abortion-rights advocate, also spoke the first night. There must be a reason for this somewhere...somewhere...




As tough of a pill as it is to swallow, Republicans know that the only way to hold onto power is to pass themselves off as, well, as most Americans. It's a good show.



This must be a motive similar to the one which caused the Democrats to spend their convention trying to convince the country that they actually gave a rat's ass about fighting terror. We shall see whose mask slips first.




So have a good time, Republicans. It could be your last happy party for awhile if all the RINOs and liberal majority figure it out on Nov. 2.



Figure what out, Mike? That real-life, actual Republicans, unlike the writhing cacodemons of your books and movies, are normal, bourgeois folks who wish no harm to anybody?


Why, you visionary you. It must have been like looking into Chapman's Homer.

Them's Fightin' Words

When I was in college, I was in the enviable position of Token Rightie in my group of friends. This is a gig that requires a strong sense of self, and the amazing capacity to nod and smile at what you find annoying. You do this not because you have no argument with the assumptions of your left-leaning pals, but because raising the argument requires more energy than it's worth. I'll never forget being buttonholed by three pals who were positive that the U.S. should slash the Defense Department to ribbons because they couldn't imagine us ever being at war again ("C'mon, whose gonna fight us?" they asked, as if I had a magic 8-ball that would percieve all conflicts). Eventually, you learn to just let them be.


All this is preface to the fisking I am about to impart against one such member of the old gang. As I said when I put Jon's Department of Homeland Security Blog on the linksheet, Jon's a cool cat and a quick wit, and sharp when he knows what he's talking about. But today he doesn't, and so I propose to show:

i know that it's unpopular to speak out against the war in iraq and afghanistan. i know that it's especially unpopular to speak out against someone like ex-NFL football player, pat tillman, who died during combat in afghanistan. yet, rene gonzalez of the daily collegian did just that, writing an article describing how pat tillman "got what he deserved."

The preceding is dripping with a pose that pisses me off. Since when is it "unpopular" to speak against the war? Everybody that had a mind has been speaking against the war since it started. They're called Democrats, and they really need to lose the martyrdom complex they seem to have developed. We do not have mobs running through the streets erecting guillotines to punish thoughtcrime. We do not have an Un-American Activities Committee bringing people before it and asking them if they've ever spoke against the Great Patriotic War Against the Forces of Satan. You're not a lone voice boldly bucking the trend. People happen to disagree with you, and they say so. Get over yourself.

now, i don't agree with everything that mr. gonzalez has to say. he does make some good points in his article, but unjustifiably takes blatant cheap shots at pat tillman. i mean, c'mon, dude, the guy just died in a war. and it would take an extreme circumstance for me to ever say that someone who was brutally killed "got what he deserved." but, aside from the childish attacks, which are unfortunately overabundant, gonzalez does have some good points.

Which are...?

not surprisingly, gonzalez is being lambasted. surely, the attacks against gonzalez' childish insults are warranted. but, to say that he is an american hater? that's basically just taking it to the other extreme. of course, the people criticizing gonzalez don't see it that way. they think, "how dare he say that pat tillman is not a hero?! the man died for our country! he died for you! for me! for us!"



yeah. great. what were you saying? sorry, i wasn't really paying attention. i was too busy picking out all the chocolate pieces in my chips ahoy.

I'm assuming that somewhere in this flippancy there's an argument, but I'm not seeing it. Perhaps you should eat something before you engage in debate. Or you should learn to like chocolate.

look, it's not that i'm unsympathetic. any man who serves in the military of any country has my utmost respect in regards to self-sacrifice. of course pat tillman showed tremendous courage. of course pat tillman is not your typical american. in fact, the irony of this is that pat tillman is the most celebrated unamerican american in recent memory. after all, what is more american than hoarding money? yet tillman turned down millions to go fight in afghanistan. that is definitely unamerican. i mean, what true american is going to throw away a few million dollars for a chance to die?

It begs the question of why this non-american threw away his life to save us greedy american pustules. Maybe Tillman saw in us something worth saving.


Incidentally, Jon, I'm an American and I don't, to my knowledge, hoard money. I save some for the day when I won't be able to work, but that's about it. I'm pretty sure you don't hoard money, either. Who do you know that does?

the real problem here is that no distinction is being made between what tillman believed he was doing and what he was actually doing.



pat tillman believed that what he was doing was important. in actuality? well, apparently he wasn't too bright. or he was a republican. and let's be honest, there's not much difference.

Oh, touchez, D'Artagnan. Where DO you come up with them?

as gonzalez pointed out, it's not as if the united states was under attack and mr. tillman was defending his country. he volunteered to go overseas, to a hostile environment, to participate in a war that was started by the united states to protect the interests of united states politicians. that doesn't necessarily include your and my "security."

So no war that Americans fight overseas has anything to do with our security or defending ourselves. That would seem to include every war we've fought since Appomatox. Gee, too bad for those guys that got zilched storming the beaches of Normandy. They must not have been too bright. Maybe they were Democrats. DAMN I'm funny!

it's a tricky situation. i mean, the war that tillman fought in is a complete travesty. but it's unfair to criticize him for being so blinded. after all, ingorance can't be seen by the ignorant. so were his actions heroic? it's hard to say.

The first statement here is offered without evidence. The second is patronizing to the point of being insulting. The third has a glaring spelling error of too-perfect irony.


I believe you've scored a hat trick.

let's say that, for example, you are standing in the woods. all of a sudden, a big, scary looking wild animal approaches you. in the immediate proximity of that animal you are by yourself, but off to the side there are two animal experts who are close by. one expert tells you that the animal could attack you at any moment, and there's not really much you can do to prevent him from attacking you should it decide to, so to be aware of whats going on. the other expert tells you that the chances of that animal attacking you are extremely low unless you provoke it, so you should just slowly walk away from the animal and no harm will come to you.

The last thing I ought to be doing after my "charity organization" analogy this week ("I'm Vague Man! I live in a house! I drive a car! I go to a job! I do stuff!"), is peeing on somebody else's analogy. But I think the "wild animal" here should have a few more descriptors to make it appropriate to the war. Like the fact that the wild animal just ate a family of four in an SUV. It might not do the same to you, true, but...

so, you start to back away... then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a random person comes charging at the animal. he fights the wild animal valiantly, as you quickly move to safety. unfortunately, the animal kills the man.



so, is that man a hero? did he save your life? did he protect you?



maybe. but, it was probably pointless. you probably would've been fine without his help. so, should you laud his stupidity?

Or maybe he knew something that you didn't know. It's arrogant in the extreme to assume that you would have been fine just because one of the two experts said so. The other expert and they guy who just laid down his life said otherwise. Why are their viewpoints thrown aside?


I do like your use of the word "laud" though. It's one of my favorites.

it's a yes and no kind of thing. yes, he was brave and did what he did because he thought he was being helpful. but, no, he really didn't do anything except get himself killed.



it's sort of like not being religious and having someone tell you they're going to pray for you. to them, what they're doing is helpful. to you, it's like, "whoop-de-shit."

OR, maybe they know something you don't know. And if the reverse is true, perhaps you could just try saying "thanks," and moving on with your day.


And before you conclude that what Tillman did didn't help in anyway, you'll need to find an explanation for this.

I'm down with the MST3K movie reference, though. well done.

i guess i just don't understand why this is such a big deal. i mean, do i really need to see his eulogy on television? two hours on espnews? fuck. enough is enough. i don't need to keep seeing pat tillman on television for a month and a half. just like i didn't need to see michael jackson holding his baby over the hotel balcony for a month, or howard dean screaming like a buffoon for two weeks.

Then. Turn. The. Damn. Thing. Off.

personally, i'd feel worse for a guy who got killed while trying to save a 7-11 clerk from getting shot, or a woman from getting raped, or a boy from being kidnapped, than i would pat tillman. that's just how i see it, and i'm not going to apologize for it.

Would you still feel that way if you had to watch two weeks of maudlin TV on the subject?

look, i don't have anything against the guy. he's not the one who is pissing me off. again, i do think that what he did was incredibly brave and totally unselfish, and he certainly deserves credit for giving up a shitload of money for something he believed in. but, truthfully, it shouldn't be automatically labeled as "heroic."

So...doing something incredibly brave and totally unselfish, and giving up piles of cash for something you believe in is not necessarily "heroic." What exactly IS "heroic," then?

let's be honest. if he, for example, became a born again christian and decided that he wanted to serve god and be a priest, would people think that what he did was great? maybe a few. but most people would be saying to themselves, "this guy passed up millions of dollars to violate the poop chutes of little boys? what a moron."

Oh, of course. That MUST be the only real reason why anyone would become a priest. Because the reasons they SAY they're doing it can't possibly be valid. I've seen x+1 news reports about priests making boys play hide-the-bratwurst, so that's all Christianity means to me. By the way, Republicans are ingorant!


Incidentally, catholic priests are not "born-again." That tedious phrase is reserved for evangelical protestants who, to their credit, have generally NOT been accused of molestation. Just helping you out.

it hurts me when i hear about the stories of other famous athletes whose lives were tragically taken from them, as well.



roberto clemente. thurman munson. darryl kile. reggie lewis. hank gathers.



those are just a few men whose deaths will always sadden me. now i will add pat tillman's name to that list. but, the difference between pat tillman and those other athletes is that he put himself in harm's way.

So a sports guy who dies in a plane crash is a bigger loss than a sports guy who dies in a war, because he didn't have to do that. Which is why we call it "heroic".

the bottom line is that the problem i have is not with pat tillman. it's with the media, who once again is oversaturating the shit out of something and making it more relevant that it really is; and it's with assholes who can't accept that some people don't find what pat tillman did heroic. in fact, some of us find it kind of dumb.



that doesn't make his death any less sad or tragic. on the contrary. from where i stand, his death is more disturbing.

We've now managed to work our way to the position where the battlefield death of a guy who gives up the good life to fight for his country is not "heroic," but "dumb," or "disturbing." Yet we persist in believing that we know what "most people" think.

look, whether or not you agree with the opinions that mr. gonzalez and i have (although, mine is certainly more forgiving than gonzalez'), at least give us the right to express them, especially if they are educated and well-thought (which, to be fair, much of gonzalez' weren't). it's one of the rights we have under the constitution that pat tillman thought he was fighting for.

PLEASE climb off the cross. No one is nailing you to it. All we're doing is arguing that what you're saying is poorly-thought-out. It's one of the rights we have under the constitutions that Pat Tillman thought he was fighting for.




I have no doubt that I'm going to feel guilty about this later. Or I might get madder when Jon returns fire. The future, she is a sneaky wench, always running away...

Cold Truth?

Fisked for your entertainment:




Cold Truth Vol. 3: Vote Democrat if you want to live.


This must be an example of non-threatening argument I've been hearing so much about.


TBTM Commentary by bozak


"Hi, I'm bozak, and I like fudge. Hey! You aren't wearing your anti-CIA tinfoil!"


Howard Dean has brought youth into this election process this year.


Just like Clinton was supposed to have in '92, and the 26th Amendment was supposed to in '72...


If I was between the age of 18-27 right now it wouldn?t take Howard Dean to get me involved in politics. I would do my best to organize every young person in the country to vote for the Democratic representative in the final election, provided there is an election this year.


Well, that makes se...huh?


I wouldn?t be surprised if another unexpected catastrophe happened and Coup Leader Bush decided that the time for elections just isn?t right for our country.


You wouldn't be surprised by something unexpected. That's cool! Will you be my Jesus?


Why would I say something like this? Have you forgotten the Republikkkon parties denial of ninety thousand black voters in Florida to steal the election in 2000? I remember it like it happened yesterday.


Notice that he's not citing any evidence that any of that actually happened. Merely the fact that Republicans denied what EVERYONE KNOWS happened is sufficient. After all, minorities would never lie for political purposes! Their hearts are pure as the driven sn...well, not snow, but some substance which is pure but not white. Phew. Almost stepped over the line.


Getting beyond the modern Jim Crow party and their dislike for minorities,


We'd love that, thanks.


it?s the youth of this country that really should start worrying if the Coup Leader actually wins the election this year. It is possible that the staunch Republikkkon owners of Diebold could help make the Coup Leader victorious with their paperless voting systems anyway.


Welcome to the International Society of Non-Sequitorians. We like pizza.


Cant you see it, Bush wins! The public says lets count the ballots. To which Diebold tells us, what ballots?


These are the same paperless voting systems that every news organ couldn't stop fulsomizing about after the AARP crowd got confused by paper ballots. You know, the system that was supposed to guaruntee that nobody ever had to argue about dimpled chads again. But now this is an insidious plot to make sure that all the votes go Republican. Also, notice the assumption that a Republican win in Florida is an immediate grounds for a recount. Because he can't win there, he just can't!


This being the case, the youth of our country should be organizing like no group in the history of the modern world has before.


Underneath the leadership of the Vanguard of the New Tommorrow, right?


It is the youth of this country that will be sent to die in more wars for profit for the Coup Leader and his Republikkkon party.


I seem to recall that the average age of our military during the first Gulf War was around 26. Anyone want to contend that it's lower now?


At the current time there are well over 500 American citizens who have lost their lives in the Iraq war for profit, not to mention ten thousand Iraqi?s. The Coup Leader and his Klan think young American life is worth losing in order that Halliburton and their other cronies can be given no bid contracts to fatten their pockets. Imagine the kickbacks the high ranking Republikkkons will get once they leave office.


This meme is apparently resistant to antibiotics. Although it would explain why Clinton is suddenly rolling in oil kickbacks, given that he awarded a no-bid contract to Halliburton in 1997 to deal with the Bosnian reconstruction even though another company had the LOGCAP contract. It would also explain why the Moon Landing was faked.


The only kickback for the youth who votes Republikkkon and ends up in the next war for profit can only be death.


Not security, tax cuts, or social security reform. Nope, just DEATH! Why, at the rate of 500 dead soldiers a year, we won't have any youth at all in just 200 years! Assuming that they all serve in the military, and nobody wins the war for 200 years.


That reminds me, how come the lefties never shriek about the casualty figures from Afghanistan? Surely the soldiers who died their are just as betrayed as those that die in Iraq? Why was that war okay but this one not?


Think about it, even if you are a young white racist and you vote for the Republikkkon party because they keep it real (real white),


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! He said "real", and then "(real white)"! Chris Rock would just LOVE how you stole his joke!


would you rather vote for bigots to keep racism alive, or vote democratic to keep your ass alive? You have to think that even a racist would say I choose life over hatred and bigotry. Wouldn?t they?


'Course they would, silly. Islamic bigots choose their own life over hatred and bigotry all the time. That's why the West Bank is such a serene tourist destination today.


It should be obvious to American youth that this regime's plan is for more war for profit.


Don'tcha love it when they move beyond parody?


Where will you be shipped off to?


Wah, Ah don' rahtlee no, suh. Ah'm hopin' that massa' 'membuhs that Ah been a good hand.


Syria, Iran, North Korea? Imagine casting a vote as a youth for the Coup Leader and then being shipped off to a country to fight in a war for profit.


If you wanted, bozak, you could do better than imagine it. You could ask some of the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division who've returned from Iraq how they feel about serving. Go ahead, ask them how they feel that the Coup Leader has forced them to fight a war for profit. Hope you like the taste of knuckles.


Think it can?t happen to you? It?s being said almost everyday now that our military is being spread way too thin because we are fighting wars on two fronts right now.


I haven't heard anybody say this since before Operation Iraqi Freedom. Maybe that's why we need to TAKE BACK THE MEDIA! Why, it should be obvious!


If the Coup Leader miraculously gets elected,


Hang on there, tiger. You just said that you wouldn't be surprised at all if he pulls a fasty and gets "re-selected." So now you wouldn't be surprised by the miraculous?


Gosh! You ARE Jesus!


look for the next war in the never ending ?wore on terra? to start as soon as possible. I?m sure this regime knows it?s so dirty that it could never finish another term even if the people of this country moronically elected them to office for the first time.


So they know that they can't finish another term even if they're re-elected, because re-election will have proved how much the American people don't....


*blither*


Look how long it took them to go from Afghanistan to Iraq. They never finished the war in Afghanistan before starting the war in Iraq. So most likely here comes the draft. You say you don?t want to die in a war for profit?


And here, at last, after paragraphs of deathless prose, is the rhetorical coup de grace. Why, of course! That's the plan! They'll just draft everybody! That always works! And we know that this is their real plan because none of them have even broached the subject publicly! They're just that clever and corrupt!


Did we mention the Moon Landing was Faked?


Then don?t vote Republikkkon.


Sorry, I have to. I'm a white racist who wants to see others die for Halliburton's stock price. Every day I check the casualty figures, and when they go up, I cackle mischeviously and pull my moustache, and for one bright shining moment I can forget about all the dirty minorities that have civil rights and all the poor people I haven't ridden my coach over today.




Look, I know that there's a difference between this tool and Atrios, and that aliterates of his kind are to be found on the right. But I'm not linking to them, am I?