Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting in 1974, as well as a variety of other work experience, but have been, in recent years, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring major clinical depression and bipolar disorder. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. I'm available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 618
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 24 cancellations; Total= 6
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 8 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 5
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And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration. Later note: forget I ever said this.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY found here. I'll surprise most folk by saying I favor this. I think the War on Some Drugs is one of the most self-defeating, self-destructive programs imaginable to humankind. But I have no sympathy for the evil, generally murderous, fuckers engaged in the mass market trade, wholesale or retail, any more than though I think Alcohol Prohibition was an equally idiotic, horrible, program that led to the rise of organized crime in America, I have any sympathy for Al Capone or the Mafia. We should legalize drugs. Meanwhile, shooting down these creeps is fine with me. I mention this only because I'm rilly rilly tired of leftists announcing six or ten or fifteen years later that "no one knew about this! It wasn't reported in the mainstream press!"
Bollocks.
My God, I'm getting tired of leftists "revealing" what was front page news thirty years ago. Illiterates: why didn't you read papers then? Oh, yeah, it was from the Man. But when you try to tell me it's a "revelation," uh, well, you're, uh, well frigging ignorant.
GOING OUT GRACEFULLY: Earl Hilliard spoke out on his loss:
"I see a future with a great deal of conflict between African-Americans and Jews in this country," he said. "It's going to get worse before it gets better. I don't think African-Americans are going to sit back and let this continue. There will be retribution."
[...]
The Council on American-Islamic Relations also blamed Jews for Hilliard's loss.
"Rep. Hilliard's loss shows that the domestic lobby for a foreign government is willing to use its considerable financial resources to force hand-picked 'leaders' on the African-American community. This is a defeat for democracy and civil rights and a victory for those who would institute a pro-Israel litmus test for American political candidates," said CAIR Board Chairman Omar Ahmad.
[...]
"I lost the election," Hilliard said. "It ain't the end of life. I lost it or they took it – or they stole it – one or another. When the bar was down, I just didn't get enough votes."
[...]
Hilliard declined to say what action black representatives would take to retaliate against Jewish groups supporting their opponents but he said they don't expect any help from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
The fund-raising organization for Democratic incumbents gave $10,000 to Hilliard's campaign, the maximum allowed, but the congressman said the DCCC never gives black candidates a fair share of donations.
"I know there have been other races where they have contributed more," Hilliard said of the DCCC. "If they're not going to help us in the primary, then it doesn't make sense for us to be dues payers."
(Italic emphasis mine.) Yes, the DCCC is part of the anti-black conspiracy, as well. It is well known how little regard the Democratic Party has for "black" people. And, of course, Hilliard was up against a "white" candidate in Artur Davis.
BUFFY DON'T GET NO RESPECT: The WashPoreports that the only episode of Buffy to ever receive an Emmy nomination:
has generated controversy at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which accidentally left the critically acclaimed musical episode off the Emmy nomination ballots mailed out last week. A belated postcard has gone to members listing the episode, written and composed by the show's creator, Joss Whedon, as an added entry for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series.
This as part of a longer article rightfully praising Buffy, speculating about why it doesn't get the respect it deserves:
Perhaps the TV Academy (like many TV critics) is put off by the show's somewhat juvenile title -- "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" lacks the gravitas of "The West Wing" or "Law & Order." Or maybe the problem is the show's fantastical premise, which smartly melds horror, comedy, satire and Gothic romance.
And analyzes Buffy, The Musical, aka "Once More With Feeling."
I now have tv access, incidentally, for the first time in six months, but not, weepwail, to UPN. No Buffy, no Enterprise for Gary. Woe.
RORSCHACH EVENTS: When people blog about events such as this, before anyone save the people on the ground there, and possibly not even them, could conceivably know what actually happened, and immediately begin moralizing and either attacking or defending, they say everything about their closeminded assumptions, and nothing about what actually happened.
Because they don't know what happened. I don't know. You don't know. The Pentagon doesn't know. We just, this early, have confused and contradictory reports.
Civilian deaths in a war are inevitable, and are tragic. So far, that's what we know. That people have already spent a day blogging either defenses of US forces and declarations that whatever happened must be the fault of the al Queda/Taliban bad guys, or attacks on the callous and indifferent US military: you should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Try waiting until facts are in. Facts are terribly helpful in coming to conclusions, even if they aren't always as comfortable, or even definitive, as prejudices.
PALESTINIAN VOICES: Anyone who bothers to read the polls the Palestinians themselves run knows how badly most Palestinians think of the PA, particularly its utter corruption and despotism (which is a large part of why support has shifted to Hamas, which for all that some wish to deny it, does indeed engage in a considerable social program, as well as busily slaughtering Israeli women, men, and children).
You'll recall that 91% of Palestinians demand "fundamental change" in the PA, 95% want Arafat's corrupt ministers sacked, and 83% decried the corruption of the PA.
What's weird and disgusting is to find Western leftists defending the imposition of the horribly corrupt and murderous autocrat Arafat upon the previous multiple institutions of Palestine, and defending Arafat as a "true democratically elected leader" of Palestine, which he is as much as, say, General Pinochet was of Chile, or Stalin was of Russia, or Hosni Mubarak is of Egypt, or Bashar Assad is of Syria (hey, they all won "elections" precisely as fair as Arafat's).
Here's one Palestinian leader of a democratic group speaking up, but Palestinian polls show he's quite typical.
These days, the tightly controlled Palestinian media are trying to suppress the fact that many ordinary Palestinians are heartened by the calls for democracy for Palestinians from around the world. In the West Bank and Gaza, people are whispering that there might be an end to the repression and corruption that have characterised the past five years under the Palestinian Authority.
As if the Israeli occupation and daily hardship at the hands of Israeli soldiers were not enough, we Palestinians had to witness the ostentatious corruption of our elected or appointed officials and the denial of our basic rights of freedom. Under the tight network of internal security apparatchiks established after Oslo, the Palestinian Authority suppressed dissenting voices and denied basic freedom of expression. Writers and independent voices were harassed for criticising the regime.
Still, exasperated after years of suffering and exhilarated at the idea of having our own state, I and many Palestinians were willing to tolerate the autocratic ways of the Palestinian Authority for the ultimate goal of freedom. But that did not happen. Our legitimate cause was eventually hijacked by the despotic rule of the Palestinian Authority and by those who want to speak through violence.
ONE-SIDED ANTI-IDIOTARIANISM. Long-term readers of Amygdala will note a terrible lack of editorial reliability to either Column A of Leftism, Column B of Rightism, or Column C of Libertarianism. This tends to lose us a lot of readers, who come for one piece they like, and get pissed off at other things I say. The way to popularity is to pick one column, and throw red meat to it. I manage to survive.
But I do happily wear the label of "anti-idiotarian." And I take after idiots where I see them, without regard for "hurting my own side," because my side is being against idiots and idiotic, or even dubious, ideas.
Tapped and various other bloggers recently challenged rightwing bloggers to go after Cal Thomas's lunacy as much as many people from both left and right have gone after the Fisks, Chomskys, and other idiots of the Left. The result has been mixed.
Meryl Yourish also made a similar request for rightwing bloggers to denounce Ann Coulter -- who is the right-wing Michael Moore, with added sex appeal, and who deserves precisely as much respect as Moore, just as do the people who look up to one deserve as much respect as those who look up to the other -- and has had very little response. I found one fascinating response to the Tapped request at the generally rightish Privateerblog:
Bashing the Right
Normally, us right-wing bloggers don't bother to bash idiot right-wingers because they're an embarrassment to us, whereas idiot lefties are cannon fodder. But when someone says something extremely offensive, we're sort of obligated as pundits to say something.
And then, in fairness, he goes on to say:
I'll also answer Tapped's call for right-wing bloggers to bash Cal Thomas. This guy is a whack-job.
And has a few more words of refutation for Thomas. I posted this response in his comment section about 29 hours ago:
I'm having trouble parsing your logic here, I'm afraid. And therefore lefty/liberal blogs should avoid bashing idiot lefty statements, you're saying, because they're an embarassment to the sane and sensible left?
I'm really not following you at all, I'm afraid.
No response, but he's probably just busy. But my eyes are still blinking at what he said, and I can't parse the fairness of it: political debate should be about being hypocritical, and winning for your "side"? Really? I know plenty of left-wingers feel that that's, of course, what "the right" believes, so I'm uninterested in hearing from my left readers saying "of course." Just as I see endless streams of rightists blathering about how "the left are all idiots" and "liberals are just stupid." (People of like mind to Ann Coulter, but less articulate.) Who I'd like to hear from are non-lefty readers, and particularly from conservative or right-wing readers, as to whether they'd like to disavow such a viewpoint of why right-wingers "shouldn't bother to bash idiot right-wingers," or defend it. My eyes would like to pop less.
7/03/2002 05:27:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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I am mostly a libertarian, and it's tempting for me to pooh-pooh statist proposals, which are often both illiberal and ineffective. But July 4 celebrates an event that was not made through pure individual liberty, that could not have been made through pure individual liberty, and that could not have been sustained through pure individual liberty. It was a revolution against government power, made possible and successful by the power of other governments; and those governments have remained relatively free and relatively peaceful only because they created a stronger government, which has often had to use its power to defend liberty (though unfortunately has also often used it to suppress liberty).
None of this is news to thoughtful libertarians. There is a difference, after all, between libertarianism and anarchism. But it's worth reminding ourselves on occasion about the odd, almost but not quite contradictory, mix of philosophies that is needed to make liberty flourish in a dangerous world.
Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who has worked with Gephardt and House Democrats over the years, said, "The reality of Gephardt is much more complex than the stick figure portrait that people sometimes draw of him, and part of the challenge for his candidacy would be to move people beyond the superficial caricature."
INTERNAL SECURITY, MA'AM: WE'RE HERE TO HELP: Don't miss this, admidst the news that FBI and CIA reorganization will be put off until at least next year:
Among the proposals expected to be taken up by the intelligence panel are combining the counterterrorism centers at the CIA and FBI within the proposed Department of Homeland Security; creating an internal security service that would absorb the FBI's counterterrorism and counterintelligence functions; and giving the director of central intelligence control over Pentagon technical collection agencies while eliminating his direct control over the CIA.
[...]
One result of the decision to create the Homeland Security Department before tackling the issue of restructuring the intelligence agencies is that the new department will be dependent on the FBI and CIA for collecting domestic intelligence. It also will put off any move to replace the FBI's domestic intelligence-collection role with a new federal internal security service. Both ideas have generated significant interest on Capitol Hill.
IT'S GOOD TO BE A SAUDI ARABIAN PRINCESS, or so our brave State Department thinks. Although the prosecutor may deserve most of the blame.
With the prosecution's star witness unavailable to testify, a wealthy Saudi princess with legal troubles appears to be headed for a soft landing today in a Florida court.
The princess, Buniah al-Saud, a niece of King Fahd, does not have to be in court to face accusations that last December in Orlando she pushed her maid down a flight of stairs, a Florida prosecutor said. Through her lawyer, Princess Buniah will be allowed to plead no contest to a misdemeanor charge of battery, pay a $1,000 fine and give a judge a letter of regret about injuries to her Indonesian maid in the incident.
That's what made me angry, was I read in the press -- and by the way, the press is not conservative as people -- some people say its too conserv -- some people say, oh, the press is liberal. It's not either. It's lazy and obnoxious.
STEAM-POWERED LASER-POWERED FLIGHT for paper airplanes, real airplanes, and satellite launches are written about here.
In the June 10 issue of Applied Physics Letters, the scientists describe their folded plane, with a wingspan of about two inches and a weight of less than a hundredth of an ounce. At the back of the planes, they attached small aluminum targets to bounce the laser light.
Reflected particles of light impart a small force, like a stream of water from a garden hose hitting a beach ball. But that force is too small to lift even something as slight as their craft from the ground.
They then placed a droplet of water on the aluminum. Now, a pulse of laser light, in addition to bouncing off the aluminum, heated some of the aluminum into a superhot gas, which blew away the water like exhaust from a rocket engine.
"It's very hard to measure the water speed because it's very fast," said Dr. Takashi Yabe, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Tokyo institute and the lead author of the Applied Physics Letters article. The spray of water particles moved at speeds of at least 200 miles an hour, he said.
With the burst of thrust, the paper airplane lifted off from the laboratory workbench and glided to the ground.
"The significance of our idea is using water," Dr. Yabe said.
[...]
In October 2000, a carbon dioxide laser at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico pushed a shiny, acorn-shape craft about the size of a softball 233 feet into the air.
That remains the record altitude for a laser-driven rocket. The flight lasted less than 13 seconds.
Dr. Leik N. Myrabo, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and designer of the laser-driven "lightcraft," foresees going much higher in the future. A laser 10 to 100 times as powerful could be strong enough to accelerate a small craft to a speed six times as great as the speed of sound to the edge of space, he said.
RIDICULING THE PLEDGE DECISION: Matthew Hoffman makes a spot-on point, which I amplify by noting the mainstream blogger reaction: blogger after blogger ridicules the decision, and ridicules the notion that any child could feel coerced, or that that should matter.
"Kids should have tough skins!" is a common phrasing. "Kids can't be over-sensitive and shielded!" is another. There are many variants, all heart-felt, to be sure.
All said by people engaged in mocking the decision, the court, the ACLU (which had no involvement whatever in the case, but let's ad hominem, shan't we?), and anyone who supports the idea that the State should not be enforcing any ideas about religion, pro or con.
All said by people not noticing they are engaged in precisely the sort of ridicule and pressure those who would abstain from saying the Pledge are subjected to.
The only way to make the case that, in fact, it wouldn't matter if kids voluntarily abstained from saying the Pledge, would be to act as if it didn't matter. By engaging in the hysterical reaction Congress, the President, 99% of all American politicans, and many bloggers have engaged in, said people have proven the opposite of their case; they have demonstrated precisely how strong the reaction is to those who go against the orthodoxy in declining to swear allegiance to someone else's religious beliefs.
[critics say] the reference to God in the current version of the Pledge is simply a bit of harmless fluff, a minor bit of "ceremonial deism" that poses no real danger to anyone's religious freedom. But that argument is a little hard to swallow, given the intensity of the public reaction to the Ninth Circuit's decision. If the phrase "under God" is meaningless--a notion that many religious people would vehemently disagree with--then why does it need to be in the pledge at all? And why are so many people so angry about its potential exclusion?
If it doesn't matter, it doesn't, you know, matter. But it does matter. You said so.
OUR FRIENDS, THE SAUDIS: Of course, it would be wrong to criticize any aspects of their culture, which we must respect as an ancient one. It is different from ours, and we must respect their ways, such as calling Jews "monkeys." We must not be intolerant. After all, our culture is what we should most focus on criticizing and improving; we have no right to think badly of others before we've done that. Why, surely we're as bad, if there is such a thing as "bad," as they are, given all the evil, if there is such a thing as "evil," in our own society and selfish aggressive imperialism. Right?
The government of Qatar is spending millions of dollars to expand al-Udeid. Over the past months, the U.S. military quietly has moved munitions, equipment and communications gear to the base from Saudi Arabia, the control center for American air operations in the Gulf for more than a decade.
About 3,300 American troops are in Qatar, mostly at al-Udeid. The base is an isolated outpost amid a flat, seemingly endless stretch of scrubby desert about 20 miles from Doha, Qatar's capital.
Signs of an American military buildup are unmistakable:
-A tent city has sprouted, along with huge, air-conditioned warehouses and miles of security barriers that attest to the U.S. military's sharpened focus on protecting troops against terrorist attack.
-Freshly paved runways and aircraft parking ramps stretch deep into the desert. Al-Udeid's main, 15,000-foot runway is the longest in the region and can handle the largest Air Force transport planes.
-Newly built hangars for fighter aircraft are hardened to withstand aerial attack. Within view from the main runway are dozens of hardened bunkers, presumably for storage of munitions and supplies.
Etc. Go, 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, and the Red Horse. Key quote:
Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, said this year he had no plans to move the [Combined Air Operations Center at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia] air control center. But he added, "That does not mean that I don't have plans to replicate it.''
Or, why I'm not remotely kneejerk that Military Spending Must Be Bad. Let's also note:
An information packet given to American reporters who accompanied Rumsfeld on a recent visit said the only military base in Qatar that the Qataris permit to be publicly identified is al-Udeid.
There are two other important U.S. military posts in Qatar. One is at Camp As-Sayliyah, on the outskirts of Doha, where tanks and other armored vehicles, ammunition and tons of other Army equipment are stored. These supplies and materials can fully outfit for combat an Army brigade of about 5,000 soldiers. In the event of war, the soldiers would fly to Qatar and match up with their equipment.
The Army also runs Camp Snoopy, adjacent to Doha's main airport. It is a logistics hub, receiving tons of supplies - everything from food and fuel to medicines and munitions - by air and sorting them out for delivery in the region. About 900 U.S. soldiers work at Camp Snoopy.
There is even a team of Army veterinarians based in Qatar. They provide medical care for the military's bomb detection dogs and they conduct food safety inspections in six locations in the Middle East.
SCOTUS'S season, er, term, is wrapped up lengthily by Linda Greenhouse, who correctly notes that it is the triumph of Chief Justice Palpatine, er, Rehnquist.
I was busy when the school drug testing decision, Board of Education v. Earls, No. 01-332, came down, but it's an appalling view of both the Fourth Amendment and the rights of minors, who apparently have no Fourth Amendment rights whatsoever according to Rehnquist and his Gang of Four. Test 'em all, because it will help fight the War on Some Drugs, and it's for the children.
Breyer was certainly no "liberal" on Fourth cases:
Justice Breyer left his usual allies and joined the conservative bloc to vote with the government in two cases on the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches. His was the deciding vote to expand the ability of public schools to subject students to random drug tests, and he joined the 6-to-3 majority that validated a law enforcement technique in conducting random searches of intercity bus passengers.
YES, VIRGINIA: J. Bowen of No Watermelonssays of Virginia Postrel:
on stem cell research she's lost it. We can argue about whether embryonic stem cell research ought to be banned or not. What is unmistakably wrong is that Virginia Postrel's opponents are "criminalizing science" or are supporting "prison terms for biologists".
Unless we are to assume that she believes that anything a biologist might want to do for research is legal and ethical. Which puts her in some select company - do I have to mention who?
I expect better than that from her.
I'd hope J. Bowen would parse elementary logic and grammar. Virginia did not say that opponents of embryonic stem cell research are "criminalizing all science," or "supporting prison terms for all biologists." Had she, he'd be correct. Similarly, she did not declare support for "anything a biologist might want to do for research." I'm quite sure Virginia does not support, say, picking people randomly out of a crowd for live dissection.
But we don't need special laws to keep biologists from doing this. The supporters of criminalizing stem cell research say we do need to pass special laws to make such acts criminally punishable.
Virginia said something objectively true: supporters of those bills are making a particular act of scientific investigation criminal. The bill provides for prison terms for biologists who violate it. These are simple facts. J. Bowen may fully or partially support those bills and provisions, and that's his right. But to declare that the bills do not, in fact, do these things, is simply false, and to say that Virginia Postrel has "lost it" for stating simple facts, is a curious judgment.
ON THE POLITICAL FRINGE is the judgement of Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor and columnist of the Atlanta Constitution, regarding Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard, in her most recent column. Tucker is generally considered a liberal; her column is syndicated with
See Also: Other liberal writers: Mary McCarthy Ted Rall Richard Reeves David Shribman Cynthia Tucker
Tucker says, among other things:
But it is unfortunate that so many Arab Americans have chosen to support Hilliard and McKinney. Hilliard is a loose cannon, a dimwit, and perhaps a crook, to boot. McKinney -- while never accused of either stupidity or dishonesty -- is nevertheless given to a similar extremism. The Palestinian cause did not profit from Hilliard's association with it; it won't gain from McKinney's support, either.
Hilliard's district has few Jewish American or Arab American voters, and he has never been mistaken for a Middle East expert. Nevertheless, in 1997, he made a controversial visit to Libya, an international pariah. He also gained a reputation for trying to persuade his colleagues to vote against pro-Israeli initiatives.
Last November, just two months after the terrorist atrocities, Hilliard placed himself well outside the political mainstream by introducing a bill to drop sanctions against rogue nations.
While he defended the nation's enemies, he also misused campaign funds, bought personal items for himself and doled out campaign money to family and friends. In June 2001, he was rebuked by the House ethics panel.
McKinney, meanwhile, has earned international notoriety for her intemperate remarks related to the terrorist attacks. In April, McKinney in effect suggested that President Bush had aided and abetted the Sept. 11 hijackers, hinting that the president knew of the attacks in advance but deliberately failed to prevent them so that his friends in the defense industry would profit from the ensuing war.
Last year, McKinney made an ill-considered apology to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal after his offer of a $10 million donation to a Sept. 11 relief fund had been justifiably rejected by then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In making the offer, the prince had suggested American foreign policy had prompted the attacks.
All in all, McKinney, like Hilliard, has shown herself to be on the political fringe, well outside the congressional mainstream and incapable of aiding any cause, whether an independent Palestine or her own congressional district.
The plight of Palestinians and their desire for an independent homeland is a serious cause deserving of thoughtful, mainstream advocates. Hilliard wasn't one and neither is McKinney.
HE'S DEAD, JIM: From a New Yorkerpiece on an obit writers conference:
He also recited excerpts from a compendium of euphemisms for "died": "was ushered to the angels," "passed from this plane to a higher plane," "made his transition," "passed into life's next adventure," "received his final marching orders," "departed this life on his Harley-Davidson," "graduated to phase two of God's eternal plan," "became a handmaiden of God," "was royally escorted into her heavenly home," "teed up for Golf in the Kingdom," and—my favorite—"went fishing with Christ!! on Friday."
What's the conference like?
"We're a small but élite group," Gilbert explained when I told her I was thinking of attending. "We really study the art and science of the obituary. The purpose is serious, but we have great fun."
J.C. WATTS IS OFF TO "SPEND MORE TIME WITH HIS WIFE AND CHILDREN"as expected. (For an example of how expected, compare the above "after press conference" story to the "before" version.)
Tom Cole will be the Republican nominee, according to Roll Call, but the race is seen as entirely competitive.
Cole described the district as strong "J.C. Watts territory" but a challenge for anyone else. The district is 68 percent Democratic in registration, but 61 percent of its voters punched the ticket for George W. Bush in the last presidential election.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone has applied to rejoin the Labour Party after his expulsion two years ago for running as an independent in the city's first mayoral elections.
Mr Livingstone hopes to be eligible to stand as the Labour candidate in the next elections, in two years' time.
Great quote from Deputy PM John Prescott:
I just don't believe this man on whatever he says but of course I'll be fair in my considerations when it comes before the executive
Yes, of course.
I should be surprised to find Ken is truly "ready to be a team player," but I've not followed nearly as closely as British readers, to be sure.
LOXLEY, Ala. (AP) -- An evangelist who was asked to sing at his wife's uncle's funeral claims he had a revelation from God that led him to insult mourners and say that the dead man was damned.
Orlando Bethel said he spoke words that ``the Lord revealed to me.'' Preaching over a microphone at the Greater Pine Grove Baptist Church, he told some 100 mourners they were ``fornicators'' and ``whoremongers.'' He said the deceased, Lish Devan Taylor, had gone to hell.
The microphone was abruptly disconnected. Bethel then reached into a gym bag for what apparently was a bullhorn. Some thought he was reaching for a gun. About half the crowd fled, with a few dragging Bethel out a side door.
QUICK ACTION: Now the EPA is ready to begin testing and cleaning thousands of lower Manhattan apartments of dust and ash. Residents have understandably mixed feelings.
And so what might seem a simple question — whether to register for the federal cleaning, in a building where the tenants' association is pushing everyone to get on board — is anything but.
Some people think the cleanup is too little, too late. Others fear that inviting the government in could dredge up old anxieties they have tried hard to put to rest. Still others struggle with personal problems that make it hard to focus on issues of health and pollution that can feel speculative and intangible.
This is the story of only one group of tenants: one floor, one building, one slice of downtown life. There is no science to their selection. They are not meant to be stand-ins for New Yorkers, but only what they are — a closely examined cross section, full of wrinkles and idiosyncrasies.
LOGISTICS, ENGINEERING, EFFICIENCY: Review of Richard Rhodes' MASTERS OF DEATH: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust.
In fact, how they approached some of their technical challenges illustrates what they did and who they were. For instance, when people who were shot at the edge of a pit would fall in, on top of those who had been shot a few moments earlier, their bodies would crumple every which way. This resulted in unused -- and therefore, from the point of view of efficiency, wasted -- space between the bodies. It meant digging more pits than if the bodies had fallen into neat rows.
Rhodes describes how Friedrich Jeckeln, an SS and police general, solved this problem. Jeckeln called his solution Sardinenpackung -- sardine-packing. ''Today we'll stack them like sardines,'' he informed a colleague at a killing site in western Ukraine. As that colleague later described it, ''The Jews had to lie layer upon layer in an open grave and were then killed with neck shots from machine pistols, pistols and rifles. That meant they had to lie face down on those previously shot.''
And here was another logistical challenge the Einsatzgruppen overcame: shooting women holding infants. How do you kill both at the same time? One solution to this problem, Rhodes explains, was devised at a killing site in Latvia: mothers with infants had to hold their babies over their heads; one man shot the mother, one the child.
First chapter here. A point that can't be emphasized enough:
During the first weeks after the invasion, while the Wehrmacht still controlled the occupied areas, a historian of the Polish experience summarizes, "531 towns and villages were burned; the provinces of Lodz and Warsaw suffered the heaviest losses. Various branches of the army and police [i.e., Himmler's legions] carried out 714 [mass] executions, which took the lives of 16,376 people, most of whom were Polish Christians. The Wehrmacht committed approximately 60 percent of these crimes, with the police responsible for the remainder."
THE GOOD OLD TEXAS TEXTBOOK KERFUFFLE: It's an evergreen.
"History is ultimately a moral art, and it is about values," he continued. "It is not merely about the collection of facts. It is about the way we put those facts together and the meaning we give them. Arguments about facts are arguments about meaning."
THIS REALLY DOESN'T SEEM WORTH POINTING OUT, but Cal Thomas is, of course, a fool. Simply for this:
On the eve of our great national birthday party and in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when millions of us turned to God and prayed for forgiveness of individual and corporate sins and asked for His protection against future attacks, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has inflicted on this nation what many will conclude is a greater injury than that caused by the terrorists.
I'd like to see him say this to the faces of relatives of the dead.
And that's all that needs to be said, but in passing:
Couldn't he have simply let his daughter opt out of reciting the pledge, as children are permitted to avoid sex education classes their parents don't like?
Sure, Cal. Since that's fair, how about we institute those couple of words in the Pledge as having a couple of dozen revolving substitutes, and kids can just "opt out" of reciting the pledge if they don't want to pledge "one nation, under Satan," or "one nation, under Kali," or "one nation, under Osama bin Laden," "one nation under Rabbi Menachem Schneerson," etc. What could be more fair?
If upheld on appeal, it will turn millions of Americans into lawbreakers, because they'll continue to say the Pledge of Allegiance, just as many continue to pray before school athletic contests in violation of court prohibitions.
These are lies, of course. Everyone is free to say whatever Pledge of Allegiance and any prayer they wish, at any time, anywhere, as many times as they like, so long as they are not acting as agents of the state. No American reciting a prayer before a football game is a "lawbreaker" unless they are acting as an agent of the state. Nor, of course, is the Pledge forbidden by the decision: just the two words added in 1954.
Thomas is correct about the political effects of the 9th Circuit decision, and the probability of it being overturned, but then, this is news only to a few strands of seaweed off Okinawa.
After months of aggressive campaigning in one of the nation's most-watched U.S. Senate races, incumbent Paul Wellstone, a Democrat, and Republican challenger Norm Coleman have virtually equal support among Minnesota voters, according to the latest Star Tribune Minnesota Poll.
Wellstone is favored by 47 percent of likely voters, while 43 percent favor Coleman, a gap that falls within the poll's margin of sampling error.
Green Party candidate Ed McGaa drew 3 percent, while 5 percent had no opinion, an extremely small pool of undecided voters with more than four months remaining until the Nov. 5 election. The poll of 812 Minnesotans was conducted June 20 to 24.
THAT DARNED JEWISH MEDIA: Cliff Rothman surveys some of the major Jewish media people of 1972 for reactions to the Billy Graham-Nixon tape.
"He just showed that he was the pious hypocrite that we all knew that he was anyway," says Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had served in the Kennedy White House a decade earlier. "Sinclair Lewis wrote about all those fellows in the great Elmer Gantry."
[...]
Carl Bernstein [...] "And it looks to me like Graham initiated this particular exchange. Whatever the case, it's sickening."
[...]
Did Graham's remarks suggest a bounty of similar anti-Semitic slurs in power corridors? Answers to this query fell on either side of a Jew-gentile divide. Jews like Kalb, Schorr and Garment believe that anti-Semitism was lurking back then in the corridors of power and still thrives in what Kalb describes as "the sort of private golf club--this clubby atmosphere where people are sitting around, taking off their sneakers and mumbling about Jews and media influence and power and control. I thought it then, and believe it continues today." His famous baritone was clenched as he spoke.
In contrast, gentrified gentiles like Otis Chandler and Ben Bradlee denied coming across anti-Semitism in their circles. "I don't think I was naive, but I did not experience people talking that way," says former LA Times publisher Chandler, who in 1972 also ran Newsday and the Dallas Times Herald, and was on the board of the Associated Press. "Certainly not at my level, at the leadership level."
And the Boston-born Bradlee, who pegs himself as "WASP to the nth degree," says his parents "never talked like that. I mean, they were anti-Roosevelt, but they weren't anti-Semitic." After he arrived in Washington, "I never heard that kind of talk again."
Sundry others counter that; Dan Schorr testifies that he wasn't hired by the NY Times in 1953 because he was Jewish. Various other interesting perspectives. Renata Adler is quite mad:
Then there's cultural historian Renata Adler, who dismisses the tapes entirely. "I think it's silly to take this private conversation and draw any conclusions--about the situation that year, about the anti-Semitism. Sometimes they mean it for ten seconds, sometimes they mean it for their whole life. The only significance is that Nixon and Graham didn't conduct their public life anti-Semitically."
No, it's not as if they sat around the Oval Office having such discussions. Or as if Nixon issued countless orders to have Jews audited, because they were Jews, or departments investigated to find out how many Jews worked in them, and so on. No significance to any of Nixon's numerous memos and declarations and directives to his aides along these lines. No, siree.
6/30/2002 02:50:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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CHEERS: Beer orders to suppliers to the Palace of Westminster have doubled since October. Commons Speaker Michael Martin:
"The tragedy is that young people get elected to the Commons believing they can play a part in putting things right. "And when they find they can't - because so many of the decisions are taken outside Westminster now - they resort to the drinking dens."
THE ANTI-SEMITISM STORY CONTINUES: The Independentreports:
A new form of anti-Semitism has taken hold in Europe, fuelled by anti-Israeli sentiment, according to a survey which shows almost one in three Europeans now harbours some anti-Jewish feelings.
Attitudes towards Jews vary across the five countries surveyed with Belgians, Germans and the French "most likely to hold a prejudiced view of Jews". Denmark and the UK are said to be the least prejudiced. But attitudes in the UK show a worryingly high level of anti-Semitic sentiment.
The findings of 2,500 people polled – 500 in each country – show 30 per cent harboured traditional anti-Jewish views. The survey was commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League, a US-based organisation set up just before the First World War to combat anti-Semitism in the US.
Those polled were each read out four statements containing stereotypical anti-Semitic sentiments. The numbers who thought the statements "probably true" varied from country to country but were still very high.
One in five Britons believes Jews have too much power in the business world. More than 10 per cent of those surveyed in the UK believed Jews are "more willing to use shady practices to get what they want".
One in 10 believes "Jews don't care what happens to anyone but their own kind" while one in three considers "Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country".
Fiona Macaulay of the Board of Deputies of British Jews said: "These findings are shocking. If one was to substitute the word Jew for black there would be outrage."
THE GREATEST BATTLE IS THE BATTLE OF WITS: Fascinating detailed story of how the interrogators at Bagram in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, deal with prisoners and documents, seeking to collate information into usable form.
Indeed, Marie said most of the 70 or so prisoners she has interrogated have been cooperative and even exhibited signs of gaining new respect for her gender.
"True, some have had their choice of words for me," she said. "But when they realize that where they travel next depends on the opinion of a woman, not only does that put them in their place, it scares the bejesus out of them."
BRAVE SOULS: Three representatives voted against the House resolution condeming the 9th Circuit's Pledge decision. CNN had two of them, California Democrat Michael Honda and Virginia Democrat Bobby Scott, on Crossfire:
REP. BOBBY SCOTT (D), VIRGINIA: [...] But the fact is any time somebody has their rights vindicated by the Supreme Court or any court on a Constitutional basis, it's going to be unpopular. And so having a stream of members make a spectacle out of themselves, saying how much they disagree with the decision -- of course they disagree with the decision.
If it was a popular decision, the person wouldn't have been in court to begin with. They would have been in the legislative body vindicating their rights. Obviously it's unpopular.
[...]
CARVILLE: I know your district well. I just -- couldn't you have just kind of thrown one away and let it go over?
SCOTT: That's the point. You just throw away the Constitution. And which one of your Constitutional rights are you not going to throw away for personal political ambition? I think somebody needed to stand up and say this is not a good idea.
[...]
SCOTT: Well, part of it is frivolous, but I think inappropriate to grandstand over the vindication of someone's Constitutional rights in the courts.
Anytime someone's rights are vindicated, that will be an opportunity for an unpopular decision, because if the cause were popular, they would be in the legislature, not in the courts. And every time a controversial case comes up, we want to parade and say how unpopular it is.
Now, we were sworn in to uphold the Constitution, which means that we ought to be standing up for unpopular decisions. That's why we have lifetime judges.
