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It’s a mad, mad, mad world

The craziness just keeps on coming… (or in case you missed these gems)

 

The last few months have been fun for most Democrats, with the GOP imploding in the most public of ways. Last week’s bombshell was Senator Specter’s defection and nothing topped that but that doesn’t mean the week wasn’t funny and strange.

  • Conservatives attack President Obama’s condiment choice: Arlington, VA residents were treated to a rare POTUS/VPOTUS visit when the duo went out for a ‘working lunch’ at a local favorite. Personally I thought the most absurd thing to come out of the stop was the amount of time MSNBC devoted to it until I read this: http://mediamatters.org/research/200905070031 Sean Hannity, and a host of his colleagues, were outraged that the President ordered his hamburger with mustard and not ketchup. I get that they have been trying to paint him as someone who is out of touch with the American people but is this really the best they have? Does anyone really think FOX News is ‘fair and balanced?’ What-ever.
  • Republicans attach each other over ‘listening tour’: In an effort to ‘re-brand’ the party, several prominent Republicans set out on their listening tour. The team, made up of Mitt Romney, Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Jeb Bush held a pizza party in northern VA. Now there is an inherent irony in having Mr. Cantor (aka ‘Dr. No’ to the people on the Hill for his obstructionist positions and rhetoric – he even got into an argument with President Obama regarding the decree John Boehner issued instructing all GOP Members of Congress to reject any Obama proposals even before reading them) speak about this issue but there’s more to this than that. Shortly after, Michael Steele, head of the GOP, told the press that moderates ‘are welcome in the party as long as they don’t change it.’ My translation: We are a big tent party as long as we don’t have to listen to anyone who doesn’t share every one of our views. The National Council for a New America has said they want to focus on the ‘traditional’ Republican values such as reducing the size of government, increased personal liberties (and probably responsibility) and supply side economics and move away from the cultural issues. For some reason this just reminds me of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. It’s as if some Republicans understand the menu that has won elections in the past (during the first W administration Ohio lost more than 300,000 jobs but the state went for him in 2004 because of gay marriage) doesn’t work anymore but others want to stay where they are. Mike Huckabee said this was a ‘sad day’ – maybe for them, it sure made me laugh. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22242.html

  • Ron Paul makes sense, sort of: I don’t often get to say that I agree with Ron Paul and think most of what he said about the flu is wrong, he did get it partially right. I did read a headline that indicated the former presidential nominee and Congressman thinks the federal government is hyping the flu for its own nefarious reasons and while I DO NOT believe that, a little less paranoia about it would be a good thing. Back in 2006, I was always talking about the bird flu and all my friends and colleagues thought I was crazy. Maybe I burned through all my flu fears then but I just cannot worry too much about H1N1. Should people be careful? Sure. Should we all stock up on three months of food and water? I don’t plan to and will not get vaccinated should a vaccine be developed. My only remaining concern is that the outbreak will subside in the northern hemisphere, it will come back next fall when the regular flu season begins. http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/03/swine.flu.react/

 

Compassion and the Court: A lot has been made over comments President Obama made about what he is looking for in a new Supreme Court Justice. He said he wanted someone who understands their rulings will impact people’s lives directly and therefore they need ’empathy.’ Apparently ’empathy’ is a code word for ‘activism.’ If there are two things that get conservatives all riled up, they are ‘activist judges’ and abortion. Supreme Court nominations provide them with a twofer of sorts for them. Senator Jeff Sessions was recently given the top spot for the GOP on the Senate Judiciary Committee (kind of ironic given that the reason he is in the Senate is that he was rejected when he was nominated to serve as a judge) has said he will not vote against someone because they are gay, there will be a big fight. Team Sarah, an organization that has been raising money and doing other things for Sarah Palin (they organized a call in against Kathleen Sebelious because of abortion, it didn’t work) will get back involved but I have gone off message.

 

It may seem counterintuitive to want a compassionate court. Aristotle said that ‘the law is reason free from passion.’ I agree with that but also understand the practicality and usefulness of empathy and have a rather strange example of why it is so important. If one country has proven they understand this principle, it’s Rwanda.

 

Fifteen years ago, Rwanda was the site of one of the worst genocides in history. In three months, nearly one million people were killed by their own friends, neighbors and even family and all this was done basically by hand. Many international organizations dismissed the country and decided peace was impossible there. They proved us all wrong. A big challenge they faced was that for the first time survivors and the killers would be asked to live alongside each other and many thought this would lead to more violence. The government responded by setting up smaller courts all over the country. In these Gacaca courts, the killers faced the survivors and in exchange for telling the truth, received much lighter sentences. This gave the survivors to confront them and get some justice. It also meant that previously unknown details of the genocide were uncovered. Moreover, the death penalty was abolished. While Hutu militants claimed the newly installed Tutsi president was having any Hutus who went home killed, they weren’t. It’s not perfect or pretty but has allowed that country to start to heal.

 

This is an extreme case, of course, but if they can work through their problems to achieve some normalcy via a better judicial system, maybe that’s a lesson we can learn here.

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News Montage

Arbitrary collection of recent events:

 

  1. Swine flu: Any story that can knock a subject like torture off the front pages has to be huge, and bad. This is both. The current strain is a Flu A subset H1N1 (There are several flu types – A, B & C – only A can cause an epidemic or pandemic. H is the protein hemagglutinin, which gets the virus into a host cell and the N is neuroaminadase another protein that turns the cell into a virus factory). Being an A H1N1 means it is also a descendent of the 1918 flu that killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. And this was before air travel became. It used World War I to travel through Europe. Its origins are disputed, some scientists believe it began in China while others say the first outbreak was in Kansas (check out, Gina Kolata’s Flu: the story of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and the search for the virus that caused it or John Barry’s The great influenza. Or Google it. With over 150 deaths in Mexico so far and cases in at least seven US states, this has the potential to be really, really bad. I would hope anyone concerned about this would check out either www.cdc.gov or www.who.org to get information as the media loves a crisis.

     

    In fact when asked about the similarities between this flu and the 1918 version, Sanjay Gupta’s comments only seemed to make a pandemic seem more likely today than it was then. When he responded to viewed questions he talked about the lack of air travel, the ability to be contagious with the flu before symptoms appear and then digressed into how this differs from seasonal flues in that its impact is seen mostly in young, healthy people rather than the very young/old. So what you’re saying, Sanjay, is “Yes, this could very well kill everyone in the prime of their lives.” I am not saying he should sugar coat anything but we are already near panic about everything else – the economy, terrorism, war, pirates – this is not the time to freak out.

     

  2. Politics and the flu: Because how the two parties view this is the real question du jour. President Obama’s stimulus bill apparently included $850 million for pandemic prevention but was taken out in a compromise with Senator Susan Collins (R-NH). Her vote was crucial to the bill’s passage through the Senate but one has to wonder why this was signaled out. Her office issued a statement that she thought this was a worthy cause but should go through the appropriations process rather than be considered stimulus. The interesting this about the current crisis is that the 1918 flu caused a one to four percent drop in the US GDP. The 2010 budget does contain money, albeit much less, but I wonder if this grows will we look and think that it was just too little, too late?

 

  1. Red rover, red rover, send Arlen right over: The only Democrat who didn’t look like he was happy about Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democratic party was Congressman Joe Sestak (D-PA) but that’s only because he wanted to run for the Senate himself (and people say Specter put his ambition before his country). Bah-humbug. I am ecstatic about it. No, this will not give the D side a totally filibuster proof Senate but it shows how the GOP has changed. It’s always fun to watch the Republicans fight, to me anyway.

     

  2. California; find yourself here (on vacation): Maybe it’s the 11 percent unemployment rate but California recently changed its advertising campaign. The tagline used to be ‘California: find yourself here’ but they added ‘on vacation’ to the end. Interesting times.

     

New Yorkers miss Eliot Spitzer: It may be the economy but it seems most don’t like the way David Patterson is doing his job and would rather have Spitzer at the helm. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/04/poll-bring-back-spitzer-say-new-yorkers/

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We need a truth commission

The problem with torture

It feels strange to have to say this because it seems so obvious but torture is bad. Call it whatever you want – say ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ or whatever – it is still bad. Very, very, very bad. Saying this reminds me of an organization I heard about today (no joke, on NPR) called “People Opposed to Homicide.” Being in DC I have heard of all sorts of associations and whatnot, there is a “Pet Owner Association,” for example, but is there a “People Who Love Murder” group out there? I doubt it.

The idea of moral absolutes can be very tempting. With them you have lots of areas that are black and white rather than grey. My world has only a few of these. I oppose the death penalty. I won’t go into the thousand or so reasons but while making my life easier is NOT one of them (I mean intellectually, it does. Should person X get the death penalty? I don’t care if they are the Green River Killer, Pol Pot, anyone who organized the Rwandan genocide or whoever, the answer is no. I don’t have to think about it anymore.

On face value, the issue of torture is another moral absolute for me. The United States of America should not torture people. Never. Never times ten to the millionth power. We are not the United States of Jack Bauer.

Why?

  1. We undermine all the good we do and represent and create nasty precedent at the same time. We are the ‘good guys’ remember? We trot ourselves out as the beacon of freedom and justice and democracy. We are a force of good and light in the world. A force like this does not torture people. We set an example for everyone else. If we can torture people when we like, so can anyone else. Robert Mugabe is doing bad things to his people? If we let this go he can hold his head up high and say “You know, I was worried about our national security and didn’t know what to do and then I heard about what President George W. Bush did to people he thought we threats and said to myself, now there’s an idea.” And, yes I think that is possible.
  2. It doesn’t work. VP Cheney, who spent most his time in office in I think a cave or some other place has said that the methods they used provided useful information that protected us from more terrorist attacks like 9/11. Now I cannot prove this is not true but what he didn’t say was that this was the only way to get that same – or maybe better – information. Many, many experts in this have said that torture is not a good way to elicit information because a, some people will admit to anything they think their interrogators want to hear to make it stop (count me in that category) or b, the terrorist groups who would have this vital information prepare to be tortured. Al Qaeda tells its members to expect it if captured. PS to all the “24” fans out there, the military actually sent people to LA to ask its producers to stop showing Jack Bauer torture people to save the say. They said it was hurting morale because soldiers were asking “why can’t we do the things they do on TV?” No, I am not kidding.
  3. We don’t torture others to protect ourselves. Let’s not kid ourselves here. We didn’t sign the Geneva Convention because of altruism; we did it because, as Joe Biden put in a Senate Foreign Relations hearing, we don’t want our captured soldiers to be tortured. (ok, I paraphrased)
  4. If we can do it to others, we can do it to ourselves. This is not a thought I came up with, it was what Phillip Zelikow wrote in a memo to Condi Rice when he was one of her advisors. He reiterated the point this week and said that once we use national security as a reason to do this against enemy combatants we risk giving our government the right to do it to citizens. Given that the Obama administration may try to reverse a Supreme Court decision that requires police to stop questioning a suspect when they ask for or have a lawyer until that person is present, I am not sure Mr. Zelikow wasn’t on to something.

The more complicated question is what do we do now? Here is where my moral absolute fails me and my world becomes grey again. This question needs more thought but I have time.

President Obama cannot initiate any actions against the people who made this policy. Neither can Congress. To do so would just add partisan crap to an already sensitive subject. Any attempts by the Democrats to do this would just feed the never ending cycle of political retribution that began with Watergate (and if you think I am the only one that thinks this, ask around). This cannot be about political payback.

We need a truth commission modeled after the 9/11 Commission and similar to those held in Rwanda and South Africa. We need to take the politics out of it and put the justice back in. Seriously, it’s the best thing for everyone.

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I hate to say it but…

Everyone thought I was paranoid when I …

 

  • Was worried about a global flu pandemic… Granted, when I prattled on about the flu I was talking about the bird flu but I was worried about infectious disease – specifically Dengue Fever and Ebla long before bird flu came along, and now this happens: Mexico City has basically shit down due to a swine flu outbreak. This is scary because this may be the same flu that is circulating around the SW US and is eerily similar to the 1918 Spanish flu that killed millions around the world. This is also scary because flu season should be over, at least in Mexico.
  • Said I have a phobia of velociraptors… You may or may not have read that Florida is considered, by some anyway, to be the ‘Ellis Island’ for exotic species. Recent events like hurricanes let snakes like Burmese Pythons to escape and breed and become a problem (they can grow to 20 feet and have been found with six foot alligators in their stomachs). There are other reasons these animals are now all over, people buy them as pets and let them go. One such friendly critter called the Nile monitor has been wreaking havoc in Cape Coral, FL. According to the 20 April New Yorker, they ‘often hunt in packs, like modern day velociraptors.’ Apparently, they ‘are notoriously aggressive and ill-tempered. When corned, a monitor will stand on its hind legs and hiss, inflating its body and lashing its tail like a bullwhip.’ Nice. They can also travel pretty far though seem to be happy where they are… at least for now.
  • Opposed the changes to FISA… Since its creation in 1978, the FISA court has turned down five requests by law enforcement to listen to communications but that wasn’t good enough for the Bush administration, which forced Congress to change the law in 2007. It turns out, our spy agencies were listening in to Congresswoman Jane Harmon (D-CA). If they can listen to her legally, they can listen to you.

 

I don’t mean to tell you I told you so, but I did. J

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If it means we get health care reform this year, JUST DO IT!!!

Senate Democrats are considering using passing their health care reform bill under  ‘budget reconciliation’ rules that would allow them to pass it with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes they would need to avoid a filibuster.  I am all for it.  We have waited too long for this already and not only will delaying hurt the individuals who lack insurance but our current system puts our companies at a disadvantage when competing against foreign companies whose governments provide their citizens with care. 

 

My ultra paranoid side also thinks this is a national security issue – for economic and public health reasons.  As the planet warms up and as we travel farther and more often so do the vectors that carry infectious disease.  Even without travel, diseases like TB have already mutated to be drug resistant.  A large reason for this is that many who are infected cannot afford the lengthy treatment.  Add Dengue fever, Malaria, etc. to the mix you tell two friends, and they tell two friends and so on…  You get the idea.

 

Back to the Senate.  Republicans are very unhappy about the prospect of a filibuster proof bill.  Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), who accepted and the declined an invitation to join the Obama cabinet, said that this would be the equivalent to “violence against the Republicans.”  Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT),  Kit Bond (R-MO) and  John Kyl (R-AZ) have all said things that are similar.  The irony here is that while they think this would violate the rules of the Senate now, they were all for it when they needed to pass George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.  Gregg even supported it when GW wanted it to be used to open ANWR because he thought it was his ‘patriotic duty’ to support the president.

 

Honestly I am not a big fan of ‘they did it, so we can’ but this is too important an issue for too many people to let it get stalled by partisan bickering.  Nothing the GOP has done so far indicates they are being honest when they say they want to work with President Obama.  Proof:  despite the concessions made to appease their worries about the Obama budget, it was passed with zero Republican support.  If their goal is to be the ‘party of no’ and to obstruct everything, they should be pushed aside.  They didn’t elect President Obama.  Moreover they had almost eight years of total power and their policies are a big part of why we are here today. 

 

If you agree that health care reform is too important to put off call your Senators – 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121.