US Politics

The non-political Vietnam Veterans of America have condemned the Purple Hearts band-aids worn as jokes by some Republican delegates.

Vietnam Veterans of America has received reports of delegates at the Republican National Convention disseminating and wearing “Purple Heart” band-aids in mockery of one of nation’s most distinctive honors, the Purple Heart medal…

The spirit of the award recognizes the personal sacrifice of our troops without regard to the severity or nature of the wound. It is the wounding itself that merits the honor. To demean the decoration and the sacrifice it symbolizes demeans all veterans and the patriots who honor them.

With our nation’s sons and daughters at war to protect global freedom, demeaning military service in this way is especially hurtful. Vietnam Veterans of America urges all Americans to decry this type of outrageous, disrespectful, and infantile behavior.

(Bitter rant with links to Bush-supporters who thought this was funny deleted)

Good.

Via Oliver Willis

As a fellow prohibitionist I decided to send an email to Mr Hastert asking him either to assure me that he has turned over the evidence he has of Mr. Soros’s wrongdoings to the relevant authorities or, if there is no evidence, to withdraw his accusations as prominently as possible. I got this very odd message after I send my email:

bq. Due to Congressional franking rules I cannot send a personal response to people outside the 14th District of Illinois. Your opinion is still important to me though and will be registered.

What on earth does this mean? The Speaker of the House is not allowed to correspond with people outside his district? Can this be right? I am not asking this frivolously, or to make a partisan point against the Speaker, since my experience of US electoral and campaigning laws is sufficient to know that it is labyinthine and bizarre in the extreme; incredible as it is I’m entirely willing to believe it. I ask so that some of the experts out there can explain what it means.

Fred Clark has two excellent posts (here and here) about the Republican vision of the “ownership society.” I can’t help but quote this:

Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., began his speech Tuesday at the Republican National Convention by talking about his father. “My dad, a family doctor in Tennessee for 50 years,” he said.

That would be Thomas Frist Sr., the founder of Columbia/HCA — a giant chain of more than 500 for-profit hospitals, outpatient centers and home health care agencies. HCA is worth about $20 billion.

So your basic Tennessee country doctor then.

Or this:

… The Republicans’ agenda … potentially involves a historic restructuring of the American system of government. Roughly two-thirds of taxable income is paid to workers in the form of wages and benefits. The other third goes to reward capital, or accumulated savings, in the form of corporate profits, dividends and interest payments. If Bush’s economic agenda was fully enacted, the vast bulk of these payments wouldn’t be taxed at all, and labor would end up shouldering practically the entire burden of financing the federal government.

In a new book, “Neoconomy: George Bush’s Revolutionary Gamble with America’s Future,” Daniel Altman, a former economics reporter for the Times and The Economist, describes what such a system might look like. “The fortunate and growing minority who managed to receive all their income from stocks, bonds and other securities would pay nothing — not a dime — for America’s cancer research, its international diplomacy, its military deterrent, the maintenance of the interstate highway system, the space program or almost anything else the federal government did. … Broadly speaking, that fortunate minority would be free-riders.”

That is President Bush’s goal and agenda for the next four years. Sound good to you?

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“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”

That’s a quote from a Supreme Court ruling in 1972. It’s also apparently a state secret, as the Justice Department tried to black it out on a court document.

It’s part of a complaint brought by the ACLU (.pdf file). One aspect of the Patriot Act is a gag provision that prohibits anyone who receives a National Security Letter (a request for information) from “disclos[ing] to any person that the [FBI] has sought or obtained access to information or records.” The ACLU is contesting this, and their legal documents are subject to redacting by the Justice Department. This quote from the Supreme Court was one of many portions redacted.

If you’ve ever thought about becoming a member of the ACLU, this might be a good time.

What kind of limpwristed surrender monkey would deride one of his own country’s most important military honours as being a bogus scheme cooked up for political purposes? Morton Blackwell, Republican of Virginia (and dozens of other delegates to the RNC). (hat tip, commenter Peter Murphy)

Personally, I blame Kieran. He was obviously the one who gave them the idea.

Update Just looking around, I haven’t found anyone on the Republican side of the aisle who is at all upset by this. The fact that it might not play well politically has obviously sunk in with the convention organisers, who’ve tried to call a halt, but there’s no-one denouncing this guy in the way that, say, Ted Rall copped it from lots of people on the left, including CT. Perhaps commenters would like to point me to those I’ve missed. (Please don’t bother with arguments that Rall is worse than Morton. I agree that he is. OTOH, Rall is a cartoonist and Morton, along with dozens of likeminded people, is a senior figure in a major political party).

HASTERT: You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where — if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from. And I…

WALLACE: Excuse me?

HASTERT: Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years — George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there.

WALLACE: You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?

HASTERT: I’m saying I don’t know where groups — could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know. The fact is we don’t know where this money comes from.

Readers are invited to share some of the other things we don’t know. If we’re creative enough, maybe the Speaker of the House will share them with the world next Sunday.

Via Kevin Drum. Welcome back.

UPDATE: Suggested by R. Robot, here’s a useful chart comparing George Soros to Reverend Moon.

Richard Silverstein at Tikun Olam has a few posts (here and here) about the decision of the State Department to deny a visa to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan was to begin teaching in the fall at Notre Dame. (See also Chris’s post on the subject.) A spokeswoman for the State Department:

said Mr. Ramadan’s visa was revoked under a legal provision that bans espionage agents, saboteurs and anyone the United States “knows, or has reasonable ground to believe, is engaged in or is likely to engage after entry in any terrorist activity.” She said she could not provide any details about Mr. Ramadan’s case.

I don’t know much about Ramadan, and no scholar is owed a visa. However, I’ve just read Daniel Pipes critical article about why Ramadan should be denied a visa (linked by Silverstein). His evidence alone doesn’t sound like it’s strong enough to keep him out of the country.

It’s maddening. I don’t like second-guessing this sort of decision, and it’s absolutely possible that there is good reason to suspect Ramadan. If that were true, the State Department probably shouldn’t be sharing their suspicions in great detail. But… if there’s real reason to suspect this scholar will engage in felonies while teaching at Notre Dame, why would the State Department invite Ramadan to reapply for another kind of visa?

Australian PM John Howard has called an election for 9 October. I’ve discussed the political issues here, but CT readers will also be interested in the implications for the efficient markets hypothesis. Centrebet , which didn’t do brilliantly last time, has the (conservative) Coalition at $1.55 and Labor at $2.30. If I’ve done my arithmetic properly, and allowing for the bookies’ margin, I get the implied probabilities as 0.60 for the Coalition and 0.40 for Labor. The polls have Labor ahead, but looking at all the discussion, I’d say that the consensus view is that the election is a 50-50 proposition, and that’s also my subjective probability.

How good a test of the efficient markets hypothesis will this be? Bayesian decision theory provides an answer[1]. If our initial belief is that the EMH is equally likely to be true or false, and the Coalition wins, we should revise our probability for the EMH up to 0.55. If Labor wins, we should revise it down to 0.45.

fn1. The workings are easy for those who know Bayes’ theorem and accept the modern subjectivist interpretation , but they won’t make much sense to those who don’t.

Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t bother to read Pentagon reports, even the ones he commissions himself. Or Donald Rumsfeld is a liar.

The reports, one by a panel Mr. Rumsfeld had appointed and one by three Army generals, made clear that some abuses occurred during interrogations, that others were intended to soften up prisoners who were to be questioned, and that many intelligence personnel involved in the interrogations were implicated in the abuses. The reports were issued Tuesday and Wednesday.

But on Thursday, in an interview with a radio station in Phoenix, Mr. Rumsfeld, who was traveling outside Washington this week, said, “I have not seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes.”

A transcript of the interview was posted on the Pentagon’s Web site on Friday. Mr. Rumsfeld repeated the assertion a few hours later at a news conference in Phoenix, adding that “all of the press, all of the television thus far that tried to link the abuse that took place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not yet been demonstrated.” After an aide slipped him a note during the news conference, however, Mr. Rumsfeld corrected himself, noting that an inquiry by three Army generals had, in fact, found “two or three” cases of abuse during interrogations or the interrogations process.

[Sir, there seems to be smoke coming out of your trousers…]

In fact, however, the Army inquiry found that 13 of 44 instances of abuse involved interrogations or the interrogation process, an Army spokeswoman said. The report itself explicitly describes the extent to which each abuse involved interrogations….

Mr. Rumsfeld also misstated an important finding of an independent panel he appointed and is led by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, saying in the interview with KTAR radio, “The interesting thing about the Schlesinger panel is their conclusion that, in fact, the abuses seem not to have anything to do with interrogation at all.”

But the first paragraph of the Schlesinger panel report says, “We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere.”

.

What his excuse? “That The New York Times would find the secretary’s misstatement and the subsequent effort to set the record straight is of interest is a shameless example of news that is sought during the dog days of August in Washington,”…Pentagon spokesman, Eric Ruff said.

Misstatements. My people call them “lies”.

Brad de Long gives a rather unenthusiastic case for thinking Kerry will be a better economic manager than Bush. The first and most convincing of his proposed reasons is that

The Bush administration always does much worse than you anticipate, no matter how low your expectations are

The others are the quality of his team and the fact that he will restore proper processes.

The reason Brad doesn’t display more enthusiasm is that Kerry hasn’t given much ground for it. Kerry has a plan to cut the deficit in half, but then, so does Bush[1].

I’d like to offer an argument based on political business cycles to suggest that Kerry has to do better than Bush.

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George Bush:

“I can’t be more plain about it,” Bush said. “I hope my opponent joins me in condemning these activities of the 527s (political groups that sponsor to ads). I think they’re bad for the system.”

Uggabugga links to a list of 527s and asks, “Why does the Bush campaign object to ads that the Oregon Grocery Association might run? What are they doing that is objectionable?”

Sorry to keep harping on this, but it’s pretty incredible that a serious candidate would talk like this. I doubt that five people in a hundred would agree with Bush’s position if it was presented in a cooler-headed context. The right of people to organize and speak out is right at the heart of the First Amendment.

And yet, this has been Bush’s talking point: ban all the ads from unregulated groups. The Sierra Club. The Club for Growth. The League of Conservation Voters. GOPAC. The National Association of Realtors. They’re all bad for the system, and none of them should be allowed to advertise at all. Bush thinks that the government should have this kind of power; he claims that he thought that he had already banned these groups from speaking.

Incredible.

Greg Mankiw’s Op-Ed made me feel much better, no matter what Brad DeLong thinks.

This morning I cut myself while shaving. It was just a superficial wound, but as I was coming out of the bathroom the doorbell rang and there was this army officer in full dress uniform at the door. He presented me with a Purple Heart. I expressed some surprise but he just said “Standard medal-issuing procedure, Sir,” adding that his job had been made much easier by “the new Homeland Security Surveillance Cameras.” I asked him did he want to come in for a cup of coffee, but he said he had to run down to Number 27 to award a Silver Star to a woman who’d just caught the pancake-batter bowl before it went all over the kitchen floor.

I know it’s hard to fire people who work for the government and all, but why does Teresa LePore still have a job?

Palm Beach County has introduced an absentee ballot that requires voters to indicate their choices by connecting broken arrows, sparking criticism that it is even more confusing than the infamous “butterfly ballot” used in the 2000 election.

Theresa LePore, the elections supervisor who approved the 2000 butterfly ballot, opted for a ballot design for the Aug. 31 primary that asks voters to draw lines joining two ends of an arrow. LePore said she selected the ballot after tests showed it was easier for voters.

Jesse at pandagon has more.