The truth is that there’s no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It’s just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children’s medical bills “welfare,“ with all the negative connotations that go with that term.
Paul Krugman
Category: Issues of the Day
They Hate Our Freedom
Go read this from Functional Ambivalent.
Suspicious in Seattle
Speaking of what do you do when you see suspicious behavior, as NewMexiKen did earlier, take a look at the issue raised by this commentary, Suspicious in Seattle.
Now he tells us
An excellent analysis of why we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq.
From Dick Cheney.
Even more stuff
Take a Cognitive Mental Abilities IQ test from the International High IQ Society. 36 questons; takes about 12-15 minutes. Yes, it gives you your result as an IQ. (I refer to the eCMA test.)
A video of a half-time show in Korea that has to be better than the game could have been — Incredible Halftime Show.
The books may be over but J.K. Rowling goes Beyond Hogwarts in interviews.
Oh, and from Scholastic, “find out how to say Hermione, Eeylops, and Azkaban, using our handy” Harry Potter: Pronunciation Guide.
Rudy Giuliani’s business-friendly health-care plan
An informative look at how health insurance works by Daniel Gross – Slate Magazine. It includes this:
Bush and Giuliani, and advocates of their plans, want to change the dynamic. They want to turn what has been a wholesale, buy-in-bulk business into a retail business. They want to replace a bunch of giant, sophisticated consumers possessing limited bargaining power with a mass of unsophisticated consumers possessing no bargaining power. For some reason, they think you and I can do a better job negotiating with Oxford and Aetna than Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola can.
Why Bridges Fall Down
Joel Achenbach with a thoughtful look at “Why Bridges Fall Down.”
An aging country full of aging infrastructure and no consensus to do anything about it: That’s the United States in the early 21st century. An old steam pipe explodes and creates a crater in midtown Manhattan. The Minneapolis bridge was distressingly average — 40 years old. The norm, nationally, according to WaPo radio, is 42 years.
…When you go through life you have to assume that bridges won’t collapse, planes won’t fall from the sky, buildings won’t catch on fire, power lines won’t fall onto the sidewalk and electrocute pedestrians, steam tunnels won’t explode, and so on. Otherwise you’d go crazy, crossing your fingers ever time you took a step. [Actually I do that compulsively, but medication is helping.]
But for those systems to work, there have to be people who design them properly, inspect them, maintain them, and replace them when they’re worn out.
He has more. Interesting.
Iraq by the numbers
Let’s see.
Iraq’s demonstrated oil reserves: 115 billion barrels
Price of a barrel of oil at close today: $76.68
115 billion times $76.68 equals 8 trillion, 818 billion dollars
Under Saddam Hussein, share that went to western oil companies: 0
Under legislation pending in Iraq, share that will go to western oil companies: 12.5%
12.5% of $8,818,000,000,000 equals $1,102,250,000,000
Best paragraph of the day, so far
George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the “foreign entanglements” that George Washington feared would destroy our experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
Robert Scheer in the first paragraph of an essay, “The President We Were Warned About.”
Best line of the day, so far
“Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary shall investigate fully whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.”
House resolution said to be introduced Tuesday, via MSNBC.
Best line of the day, so far
“Maybe now ‘special prosecutor’ is just a ceremonial title, designed to make people feel good about the illusion of justice. Like, you know, ‘Attorney General.'”
Gonzales
This country has had all kinds of attorney generals through history — vicious, venal, vapid, virtuous. Alberto Gonzales is, however, the most vacuous of the lot. It appears he has spent too much time with the dementors at the White House and they’ve sucked out his soul. The man is so cavalier with the truth it appears he is mentally ill.
Beyond that I don’t have anything to add that Functional Ambivalent hasn’t already said better.
C’mon John Conyers, start the hearings on impeaching Gonzales’s sorry ass.
GONZALES: I clarified my statement two days later with the reporter.
SCHUMER: What did you say to the reporter?
GONZALES: I did not speak directly to the reporter.
SCHUMER: Oh, wait a second — you did not.
(LAUGHTER)
OK. What did your spokesperson say to the reporter?
GONZALES: I don’t know. But I told the spokesperson to go back and clarify my statement…
That Alberto Gonzales is a serial liar — including when he testifies under oath to Congress — has been long-established, and few people now bother to dispute it. He has been lying to Congress’ face about the NSA scandal since it first emerged in December of 2005. When he first testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in February, 2006, he made a series of statements that turned out to he so obviously false that he was forced to send a lengthy letter “correcting” and retracting so many of the key answers he gave.
That is what Alberto Gonzales does. He lies to protect the President. And the President will never fire him. Gonzales isn’t keeping his job despite his willingness to lie to Congress, but because of it. Congress has no choice to act meaningfully — impeachment of Gonzeles and a Special Prosecutor — and if they do not, then, I suppose, one could say that Congress deserves to be lied to.
Best line of the day, so far
“I can hurt my back just eating a bowl of strawberries. I wouldn’t last long picking them.”
Scott Adams with a little Lou Dobbs anitdote. He adds:
“But the dirty little secret that most Californians know is that Mexican immigrants, legal or otherwise, are bringing up the national average on the ‘good people’ meter. If that were not so obviously the case, the borders would have been shut a long time ago.”
Brown
NewMexiKen attended a talk Saturday evening by Richard Rodriguez. His presentation was sponsored by The Chicano, Hispano, Latino Program (CHIPOTLE) of the University Libraries at the University of New Mexico. He was excellent.
Rodriguez is an author and journalist, his most recent book being Brown: The Last Discovery of America
Rodriguez’s 75-minute talk was on the browning of the world. It was an anecdotal, amusing, entertaining and provocative presentation. My notes are fleeting but include:
- The Senate voted to designate English the only language. Won’t they have to stop selling burritos in the Senate cafeteria? How could you even describe a burrito — tortilla, no, guacamole, no, chile, no.
- We don’t speak English, we speak American. (German words, Spanish words, French words, American Indian words.)
- Outside the U.S. there is no such thing as Hispanics. It’s a number of cultures not a race.
- HBO did a documentary on white culture. It was 15 minutes.
- The Census suggests there will be no racial distinctions by the 2020 census. The races are becoming too intermingled.
- One of his aunts, like Rodriguez part Spanish and part Indian, married an East Indian. Their daughter, his cousin, is an Indian Indian. (And she married an American Indian so their child is Indian Indian Indian.)
- Why is Barack Obama considered an African-American (i.e., black)? His mother was white.
- He’d gotten a letter from a woman who’s father was Muslim and mother was Jewish. She didn’t know what she was but Americans think of her as the frugal terrorist.
These one-liners, of course, do not do the talk justice. Underlying it all was the theme that individuals everywhere are crossing racial lines — as they have for centuries in some cultures. It’s the browning of the world. And now people are crossing religious lines, too. Reacting to it all are the extremists, doing all that they can to stop the mingling.
The Boy on the Bus
An exceptional column today from Joel Achenbach about schools and busing and teachers and race.
The Darksider
He [Cheney] is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable “war on terror.”
More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of “cruel,” “inhuman,” and “degrading” treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: “a no-brainer for me”), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.
Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker. It’s worth reading his entire essay.
‘Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign’
An excerpt from Tuesday evening’s commentary by Keith Olbermann.
I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient. I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors. I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this republic over to a vice president who is without conscience and letting him run roughshod over it.
Best line of the day, so far
Let’s get out of Iraq
and get back on the track
— Merle Haggard
Dear GOP —
When you’ve lost Merle, well, you’re pretty much down to your cousins.
Best line of the day, so far
Under Bush, some people are imprisoned forever without due process of law while others who receive due process of law and are found guilty are set free.
Do I have that right?
Sums it up pretty well
The Plame investigation was urged by the Bush CIA and commenced by the Bush DOJ, Libby’s conviction pursued by a Bush-appointed federal prosecutor, his jail sentence imposed by a Bush-appointed “tough-on-crime” federal judge, all pursuant to harsh and merciless criminal laws urged on by the “tough-on-crime/no-mercy” GOP. Lewis Libby was sent to prison by the system constructed and desired by the very Republican movement protesting his plight.
But our political discourse and media institutions are so broken and corrupt that Bush followers (and their media enablers) feel free to make the completely-backwards and fact-free claim that the Libby prosecution was driven by “partisan” and “political” motives … because they know that there is no such thing as a claim too false to be passed on without real objection by our vapid, drooling press corps.
Good Words
Theodore C. Sorensen, who put on paper some of the finest words John F. Kennedy ever wrote, has written an acceptance speech for next year’s Democratic presidential nominee.
In this campaign, I will make no promises I cannot fulfill, pledge no spending we cannot afford, offer no posts to cronies you cannot trust, and propose no foreign commitment we should not keep. I will not shrink from opposing any party faction, any special interest group, or any major donor whose demands are contrary to the national interest. Nor will I shrink from calling myself a liberal, in the same sense that Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, John and Robert Kennedy, and Harry Truman were liberals—liberals who proved that government is not a necessary evil, but rather the best means of creating a healthier, more educated, and more prosperous America.
It gets even better.
And our best blogging buddy Functional Ambivalent has written his view on last week’s Supreme Court decision on race and schools. (Tom lives in Louisville, one of the two school districts in the case.)
In the middle ground, where families like mine just try to muddle through the day, I wish everyone would stop worrying about the Supreme Court and get back to worrying about stuff that matters. This is one of those issues that’s going to involve lots of swings of the pendulum. Maintaining a program that was developed a long time ago for a set of circumstances that no longer exist would have been ridiculous, so the court moved us forward into territory that is by definition unknown.
Bits and pieces
Harper’s Magazine has a series of brief essays on Undoing Bush: how to repair eight years of sabotage, bungling, and neglect.
YouTube has Jay Leno’s post-jail interview with Paris.
Another video, this of the
Out in Left Field takes her kids to Charles Edward Fromage. You know, Chuck E. Cheese. (A place NewMexiKen went once.) “‘Come on,’ I mumble, taking him by the hand and letting him know in no uncertain terms that he’s a pain in the ass. But that I love him anyway.”
And I know, at some level this isn’t funny, but … From The Onion, After 5 Years In U.S., Terrorist Cell Too Complacent To Carry Out Attack:
“We remain wholly committed to the destruction of America, the Great Satan,” al-Sharif said. “But now is not a good time for us. The season finale of Lost was such a cliff- hanger that we have to at least catch the first episode of the new season. After that, though, death to the infidels.”
“Probably,” added al-Sharif, who noted that his nearly $6,000 in credit-card debt from recent purchases of a 52-inch HDTV and a backyard gas grill prevents him from buying needed materials for the attack.
Try the 20Q Pocket Game Demo. NewMexiKen has the real thing and it is pretty amazing at guessing objects if you answer correctly.
Do you think Fiona Apple would be as successful if she went by her birth name Fiona Maggart?
The Decider
With his approval numbers dropping into the twenties, President Bush begins to fear for his legacy. His advisers recommend he go on Fox News and have a no-holds-barred, frank one-on-one discussion with a hard-hitting newsman like Brit Hume. Bush agrees.
Unexpectedly, Hume is ready. Among the first questions he asks is for President Bush to explain his relationship with Vice President Cheney.
Bush says they have a relationship that’s easy to understand. “I wanted him to be my vice president, so I agreed that he could make all the small decisions and I would make all the big ones.”
Hume says, “That’s great. Can you give us an example of a big decision?”
Bush responds, “Well, there haven’t been any big decisions yet, but if one comes up, I’m ready to make it.”
Race
At Slate Magazine there’s an edifying and somewhat thought provoking discussion of Thursday’s school integration Supreme Court decision by Walter Dellinger, Dahlia Lithwick, and Stuart Taylor Jr. It’s up to seven parts at this writing, but each is brief and worthy of your time.
The opinion itself is here. [pdf]
——–
Follow my thinking for a minute.
Race is a bogus construct biologically. It is still, however, a sociological construct of some power.
So, my question is, how do we eliminate the latter now that we understand there is no basis for the former?
It seems to me that assigning children to a school on account of race — whatever the motive — perpetuates the racial distinction, a distinction that doesn’t exist in nature.
So, maybe, the Court got it right — whatever the legal issues, and despite the fact that Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito are moral peasants. (I’m giving Kennedy, the waffler, a little benefit of the doubt, deserved or otherwise. He actually might be the most reprehensible of the five.)
Maybe this decision will force society — and right-minded school districts — to find means to correct socio-economic issues in our society without relying on the age-old racial distinctions that have brought about so much of the inequality to begin with.
——–
Walter Dellinger has a different point of view.