Category: Issues of the Day

The PowerPoint version from Slate.

And don’t forget the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint.

Political Animal (Kevin Drum) has a brief, thoughtful take on Clarke’s Against All Enemies.

Maybe not, but let’s try to sort out what Clarke actually says and why he says it anyway, because I don’t think it’s entirely obvious just from the snippets we’ve seen on TV over the past week. The story is a little more complicated than it appears.

Roger Ailes expresses it well.

Howie the Putz explains how those humorless, ungrateful military families just can’t take a joke:

I was at the Radio-TV Correspondents Dinner Wednesday when Bush did some slide-show shtick that includes some jokes about WMDs. I remember thinking this was pretty sensitive ground for the president to be trodding on, but it was in the spirit of good humor, and most people laughed. It’s since become a hot talk-show topic, with some members of military families upset about the lightheartedness, even though Bush was poking fun at himself.

Did he poke himself hard enough to earn a Purple Heart, Howie?

Sometimes Politicians can exclaim; “It’s just a tax cut for the rich!”, and it is just accepted to be fact. But what does that really mean? Just in case you are not completely clear on this issue, we hope the following will help.

Tax Cuts – A Simple Lesson In Economics

This is how the cookie crumbles. Please read it carefully.

Let’s put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh $7.
The eighth $12.
The ninth $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.”
Continue reading Tax Cuts 101 (or one way of looking at it)

Joel Achenbach on The Wonk That Roared:

However that high-stakes political battle turns out, Clarke’s book has given America a vivid glimpse of culture clash at the highest level of government. The protagonist is a career civil servant with an ability to amass unusual amounts of power and make himself indispensable in a crisis. The antagonists are politicians and political operatives and other bureaucrats, people who fail to schedule the high-level briefings they need, who don’t heed the civil servant’s warnings, who drop the ball time and time again.

Clarke’s book provides an archetypal figure that has been relatively rare in popular culture or political discourse: the Heroic Bureaucrat. As a general rule, Americans have viewed bureaucrats as irritating figures. In common speech, to be “bureaucratic” is to be obsessed with procedure and prone to inertia.

Bureaucrats are seen as the kind of people who follow rules that make no sense and have nightmares about someone using a No. 1 pencil instead of a No. 2 pencil. A bureaucrat is someone who attends a long-delayed meeting on the topic of whether a task force should examine the chronic shortage of available meeting rooms.

Read more.

Jeff Balkin sums up the “under God” case before the Supreme Court: “Suddenly it occurred to me: If Newdow wins his case, it will prove that atheism is wrong, because it’s going to take a miracle.”

Interesting thoughts on 9/11 from Billmon at Whiskey Bar.

NewMexiKen has been troubled that the nation has responded to that day in a purely reactive manner — orange alerts, taking our shoes off to get through airport security, police cruisers and light artillery guarding the Pentagon from Route 110. Perhaps it is just me, but I fear we are no more prepared for the general or specific act of terrorism in this country than we were 31 months ago. Maybe the 9/11 Commission will provide us with some lessons learned.

President Bush poked fun at his staff, his Democratic challenger and himself Wednesday night at a black-tie dinner where he hobnobbed with the news media.

Bush put on a slide show, calling it the “White House Election-Year Album” at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association 60th annual dinner, showing himself and his staff in some decidedly unflattering poses.

There was Bush looking under furniture in a fruitless, frustrating search. “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere,” he said.

Self-deprecating humor is welcome in a President, but this is decidedly not funny from a so-called “War President.” Nearly 600 Americans have been killed in Iraq.

From AP through SF Gate. Link via Eschaton.

An article about the Pulitizer Prizes at Editor & Publisher has this interesting tidbit:

Zack Stalberg still remembers the oddest experience he had during his two-year stint as a Pulitzer Prize jurist.

The longtime editor of The Philadelphia Daily News was on the committee choosing finalists in the commentary category in 2002 when a submission from The Onion, the irreverent humor newspaper, came before the group.

“As it went around the table, you could see that people were blown away by this work,” Stalberg said about the entry, which included the paper’s mock Sept. 11 coverage. “But it was a little too different, a little too risky. I voted to make it a finalist, but nobody else did.”

Brad DeLong takes Tom Toles cartoon one step further. [Click here to see the cartoon, which NewMexiKen noted earlier.]

It’s not enough to say that the Bush administration attacks on the character (for there are no attacks on the substance of his remarks) of Richard Clarke remind one of the flying attack monkeys from “The Wizard of Oz.” For what we have here is not just a bunch of flying attack monkeys, it is a circular firing squad of flying attack monkeys.

What an image!

NewMexiKen believes that making fun of the present terror alert system is not the same as failing to recognize the real tragedy of 9-11, or the danger possible today. Indeed it is one way of bringing attention to the fact that a meaningless warning system is being presented as if it were somehow a corrective measure.

Tom Toles cartoon on White House reaction to Richard Clarke.

NewMexiKen always thought the monkeys were scarier than the witch.

Pointer via Josh Marshall.

From CNN.com:

The last marriage licenses were handed out in Benton County at 4 p.m. local time (7:00 p.m. EST) Tuesday. As of Wednesday, officials in the county of 79,000 people will begin telling couples applying for licenses to go elsewhere until the gay marriage debate is settled.

“It may seem odd,” Benton County Commissioner Linda Modrell told Reuters in a telephone interview, but “we need to treat everyone in our county equally.”

Read more.

Two Yale professors take a look at the ethics of buying a round-trip ticket to fly one-way, in this case by Justice Scalia. They conclude —

Of course, maybe Justice Scalia plans to use the return half of his ticket later. If he does not, however, he in essence has admitted to buying a ticket under false pretenses. He made a promise without any intention of fulfilling it. Justice Scalia is no doubt familiar with the legal term for such an act: it’s called promissory fraud.

The airlines’ policy may be annoying, inconvenient and customer-unfriendly. But they can legally insist that their passengers abide by it. And certainly a strict believer in the rule of law like Justice Scalia would agree. Then again, if a case about the airlines’ pricing practices ever reaches the Supreme Court, maybe Justice Scalia should recuse himself.

Billmon at Whiskey Bar writes with eloquence on Vietnam, veterans and politics. Key excerpt:

Of course, the vets themselves are still out there — most of them doing fine (or as fine as the any of the rest of us), but some of them mouldering away in VA hospitals or nursing homes, or struggling through the remaining years of ruined lives. I have a dear friend who recently took a job as a VA social worker, working mostly with Vietnam vets. The last time we had dinner together he told me some of his stories: About the guy who’s been crying himself to sleep at night, every night, for the past 35 years; the one who’s driven everyone around him away — wife, kids, friends, neighbors — and who sits in front of the TV drinking himself into oblivion; the one who finally managed to kill himself. Third time was the charm.

But the saddest story, I think, was the guy who can’t talk about anything else but the war, and who wishes more than anything else he could go back, because that time and that place were the only ones in his life where he felt like he belonged.

After awhile my friend and I just sat at the table and looked at each other. I said something about all those poor kids in Iraq who are heading for the same blasted future, and then we sat and looked at each other some more — both of us too angry to speak.

Via the detailed review at The Road to Surfdom, a quotation from Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies:

By the afternoon on Wednesday [September 12, 2001], Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our responses and “getting Iraq.” Secretary Powell pushed back, urging focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. “I thought I was missing something here,” I vented. “Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbour.”

Dahlia Lithwick updates us on the oral argument before the Supreme Court Monday in the Hiibel case — do you have to show ID?

uggabugga has a couple of interesting timelines on counterterrorism. Take a look.

Late Show Top Ten from March 16, 2004 —

Top Ten Signs Your Supreme Court Justice Is On The Take

10. Begins every case with, “We’ll start the bribing at ten thousand.”

9. His written opinions always have several mentions of the thirst-quenching taste of Mountain Dew.

8. Regularly convenes court at the dog track.

7. Asks, “Does either attorney plan on inviting me on any hunting trips?”

6. For a Supreme Court Justice he certainly is mentioned on “The Sopranos” a lot.

5. All the bling bling.

4. His last article in the “Law Journal” was about finding the right fence for your stolen goods.

3. When you have a meeting with him in chambers, frisks you for a wire.

2. He’s on the Forbes 500 List between Bill Gates and Oprah.

1. Already declared Bush the winner of the November election.

From The Washington Post:

Jon Runnalls won Montana’s “Teacher of the Year” award last year. But even though he has been teaching science to middle schoolers for nearly three decades, he fails to meet the Bush administration’s definition of a highly qualified teacher.

His problem — a common one among middle school teachers, particularly in rural areas — is that he teaches classes in several different subjects. While he has a strong background in general science, he does not have formal qualifications in chemistry, biology and physics, as required by the No Child Left Behind legislation.

Read more.

True Majority.org has an interesting animation starring Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry. The film is an ad for the organization, but NewMexiKen thinks it is a fascinating example of the ways the Internet seems to be changing democracy (whether you agree with Ben Cohen, or not).

Click here to see the animation.

Kevin Drum on John Gray (author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus). It seems “Doctor” Gray takes exception to bloggers questioning the authenticity of his degrees.

CalPundift is now writing as Political Animal and he has some interesting commentary concerning journalism and journalists. Money quote (via Romensko): “a ghastly amount of errors and gross fabrications would be discovered.”

H. R. 3920, a Bill to allow Congress to reverse the judgments of the United States Supreme Court.

Link via Eschaton.

Comment from Electablog*:

The Justice Dept is petitioning the FCC to get much more access to your broadband and/or internet connectivity. The idea is that they need to prevent terrorists who might be avoiding surveillance by using internet telephony – which makes for a compelling argument until you ask yourself: Well, which of our freedoms couldn’t ultimately benefit a terrorist?. If the FCC goes along, what it means is that investigators will be able to essentially tap into everything you type, everything you receive and every site you visit. And when it comes to the latter, let’s be realistic. Electablog [or NewMexiKen] ain’t your problem.