“Lexington” of the _Economist_ can sometimes be pretty weird, but his most recent column is more than weird – it’s somewhere out there in the “Gamma Quadrant”:http://www.google.com/search?as_q=gamma+quadrant&num=10&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=www.j-bradford-delong.net&safe=images.
From the category archives:
US Politics
Former (?) liberal hawk Michael Ignatieff “reviews”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/books/review/17IGNATIE.html Sy Hersh’s _Chain of Command_ in the New York Times:
bq. The war on terror began as a defense of international law, giving America allies and friends. It soon became a war in defiance of law. In a secret order dated Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared, as Hersh puts it, that ”when it came to Al Qaeda the Geneva Conventions were applicable only at his discretion.” Based on memorandums from the Defense and Justice Departments and the White House legal office that, in Anthony Lewis’s apt words, ”read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to . . . stay out of prison,” Bush unilaterally withdrew the war on terror from the international legal regime that sets the standards for treatment and interrogation of prisoners. Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples, but the direct consequence, Hersh says, of ”the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion — and eye-for-an-eye retribution — in fighting terrorism.”
Via John B at “Shot by Both Sides”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/ , I see that US citizens or permanent residents who buy Cuban cigars abroad (say in the UK) and consume them there, are liable to criminal penalties of up to $250,000 and up to 10 years in prison and civil penalties of up to $65,000. So my British-based American friends who amble down to the local tobacconists and buy one of Havana’s best to smoke in their own living room will be in jeopardy of arrest on their next trip back home (if suitably denounced). [1]
From the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s “Cuban Cigar Update (pdf)”:http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sanctions/ccigar2.pdf :
bq. The question is often asked whether United States citizens or permanent resident aliens of the United States may legally purchase Cuban origin goods, including tobacco and alcohol products, in a third country for personal use
outside the United States. The answer is no. The Regulations prohibit persons subject to the jurisdiction of the United States from purchasing, transporting, importing, or otherwise dealing in or engaging in any transactions with respect to any merchandise outside the United States if such merchandise (1) is of Cuban origin; or (2) is or has been located in or transported from or through Cuba; or (3) is made or derived in whole or in part of any article which is the growth, produce or manufacture of Cuba. Thus, in the case of cigars, the prohibition extends to cigars manufactured in Cuba and sold in a third country and to cigars manufactured in a third country from tobacco grown in Cuba.
Here’s what to do if you spot an American having an illicit puff:
bq. Suspected embargo violations may be reported telephonically to OFAC’s Enforcement Division at (202)622-2430 or via facsimile at 202 622-1657.
fn1. Since the ban also hits permanent residents, Henry, Harry, Brian and Kieran had better be careful on _their_ trips home!
“Ted”:http://instapundit.com/archives/018438.php beat me to this, mostly. But I wanted to say this: I’m sure if we trawl through our 1990s archives we’ll find that the “high-minded”:http://instapundit.com/archives/018438.php and their lofty correspondents
bq. Reader Keith Rempel gets at the heart of what’s wrong here, and articulates what I couldn’t: “Kerry was using Cheney’s daughter to harm her father. … ANOTHER UPDATE: “More thoughts “here”:http://thoughtsonline.blogspot.com/2004/10/james-taranto-and-others-may-be-right.html: ‘thou shall NOT speak of another’s kid in any way that could POSSIBLY be construed as negative’ … MORE: … James Somers emails: “Kerry crassly exploited Cheney’s daughter for use against Bush and thus, by extension, Cheney. Perhaps you have to be a parent to understand what that means.”
were _right out there on the front lines_ defending Chelsea Clinton from anything that might have been “construed”:http://blog.radioleft.com/blog/_archives/2004/9/4/135257.html as “insulting”:http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire021501.shtml at the time. (We can leave aside — as perhaps too complex to grasp — the point that it is not actually an insult to mention that someone who has worked in various professional and political contexts doing outreach work with the gay community is, in fact, gay.) I’m waiting to see if the parallel to Chelsea strikes any of the “people”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_10_10_corner-archive.asp#042735 over at “The Corner”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner who are “waving”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_10_10_corner-archive.asp#042700 the “flag”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_10_10_corner-archive.asp#042692 of “‘common decency'”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_10_10_corner-archive.asp#042748 in defence of Mary Cheney at the moment. But, of course, I forget: when _they’re_ insulted it’s an offense to common decency and “civility”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001227.html, but when _we’re_ insulted it’s just more political correctness and evidence that the left is “too sensitive”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000214.html and has no sense of humor.
I’ve got to quote Andrew Sullivan again:
Some of the subtler arguments I’ve heard overnight say the following: it’s not that homosexuality is wrong; it’s just that many people believe that and Kerry therefore exploited their homophobia to gain a point. I don’t buy it, but let’s assume the worst in Kerry’s motives for the sake of argument. What these emailers are saying is that Kerry should hedge what he says in order to cater to the homophobia of Bush’s base. Why on earth should he?
The truth here is obvious: Bush and Cheney are closet tolerants. They have no problem with gay people personally; but they use hostility to gay people for political purposes, even if it means attacking members of their own families. What they are currently objecting to is the fact that their hypocrisy has been exposed. To which the only answer is: if you don’t want to be exposed as a hypocrite, don’t be one.
There are at least two bloggers (Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty and John Cole) whose disapproving reaction to this little tempest isn’t blatant opportunism. I’m sure that there are more.
I’d just like to draw a little Venn diagram, if I could.
A: Outraged Kerry-bashers who think that they feel insults to gay dignity more keenly than Andrew Sullivan or the Log Cabin Republicans.
B: Giggly Kerry-bashers who write posts like this or this (search for “When do they kiss?”)
OVERLAP: People I see no reason to take seriously.
The 9-11 Commission bill is going to conference, where Senators and Representatives will negotiate the differences between the two bills to come up with a final version to send to the White House. Katherine has a good post about the language re: outsourcing torture in the House bill.
We will have an opportunity to contact the members of conference committee to politely let our concerns be heard. Here they are; we’ll have more about this later.
House Democrats:
House Republicans:
David Drier (CA)
Pete Hoekstra (MI)
Henry Hyde (IL)
James Sensenbrenner (WI)
Duncan Hunter (CA)
Senate Democrats
Joe Lieberman (CT)
Carl Levin (MI)
Dick Durbin (IL)
Jay Rockefeller (WV)
Bob Graham (FL)
Frank Lautenberg (NJ)
Senate Republicans
Susan Collins (ME)
George Voinovich (OH)
Norm Coleman (MN)
John Sununu (NH)
Pat Roberts (KS)
Mike DeWine (OH)
Trent Lott (MS)
“Read and learn”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/10/index.html#004459. The old “pig-fucker strategy”:http://www.methree.net/archives/December/grueterthompson1.html emerges for the last month of the campaign, with the added twist of getting the party operatives to plant fake evidence.
On the subject of Mary Cheney, the labor saving device of “pointing to other bloggers” saves me from the obligation to trying to top this response from Lawyers, Guns and Money:
Reynolds breathlessly claims that “Lynne Cheney is letting Kerry have it for dissing her daughter.” How, might you ask, did Kerry “dis” Mary Cheney? Let’s look at the relevant part of the transcript:
KERRY: We’re all God’s children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.
What a monster! How could he….er, actually, this doesn’t “dis” Mary Cheney in the slightest–it’s positive in tone and substance–unless you think there’s something wrong with being gay. So are Reynolds and Kaus just rank bigots? Perhaps, but their argument on its face is almost as stupid as bigotry itself. According to Mickey, with the assent of Reynolds, the fact that Bush’s base consists of a large number of rank homophobes means that mentioning the publicly acknowledged reality of someone’s sexuality should be out of bounds–indeed, “creepy”. The intolerance of the Republican base, therefore, is a reason to vote against Democrats. Wow, fake libertarianism doesn’t get any more fake than that!
Democrats certainly do not have a flawless record on gay rights. I’m thinking of the “hairdresser” commercial from the 2002 Montana race, or attacks on Andrew Sullivan about his personal life, or Clinton’s decision to sign the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (which Kerry voted against.) Every time I hear Kerry and Edwards stress that marriage is “between a man and a woman,” it takes a little bit of wind out of my sails.
Some of this is just realistic politics, but I can still look back and see an array of Democratic moments that should make gay-positive voters wince. I just don’t see how this is one of those moments.
Andrew Sullivan has a lot to say about this. Key quote:
The only way you can believe that citing Mary Cheney amounts to “victimization” is if you believe someone’s sexual orientation is something shameful. Well, it isn’t. What’s revealing is that this truly does expose the homophobia of so many – even in the mildest “we’ll-tolerate-you-but-shut-up-and-don’t-complain” form.
Re: the alleged voter fraud in Nevada–
Is there any rational reason why new voters should be asked to declare their party when they register? Voter registration drives are the healthy by-products of political campaigns. The registrars are likely to be enthusiastic partisans, and the tempation to toss out new voters for the other guy will always be there.
Not every state makes new voters declare a party when they register. I know from experience that Washington and Texas don’t do it. In Texas, you effectively declare your party by voting in one primary or the other. Your party affiliation doesn’t appear on your registration form or your voter card. I’ve done some voter registration for MoveOn.org, and for all I know, I did nothing but register Republicans. I had no opportunity to throw out Republicans, because I didn’t know who they were. It seems like a good system.
Am I missing something obvious?
Over at Volokh, recent addition “Jim Lindgren”:http://www.law.nwu.edu/faculty/fulltime/Lindgren/Lindgren.html is making me regret once more their loss of Jacob Levy. “Here he is”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_14.shtml#1097728719 complaining about the supposedly appalling moderator bias that caused Bush to lose last night’s debate (again):
bq. Given Theresa (“no blood for oil”) Heinz Kerry, the only hard question John Kerry got all night was “I’d like to ask each of you, what is the most important thing you’ve learned from these strong women?”–and Kerry got to listen to Bush’s answer first. UPDATE: — OK, so Kerry should have answered the question about what he learned from his strong wife in this way (I’m recylcing a joke I heard last spring): [What KERRY might have said]: I developed my economic plan for the country from interacting with both my wives. Now I just need to find a rich country for the US to marry.
Clearly, Jim feels that whereas marrying into money is unseemly, being born into it is evidence of one’s good judgment. Is the parallel lesson that the US can spend the next 40 years drinking, partying and wasting Dad’s money on incompetent schemes, but still have things work out great?
I realize that hardly anyone votes on education issues in Presidential campaigns, so this may be only of academic interest, but I’ve been looking at the Kerry campaign’s plan for education (k-12, I don’t know much about higher education policy issues), and thought I’d give my tentative take on them for what its worth. There’s some good and some bad and some obscure. Just to demonstrate my non-partisanship I’d say much the same of Bush’s promises and, believe it or not, of Bush’s record – in fact, my suspicion is that if you really cut through the detail of the two programs the most significant thing in both is the same thing – promises of a great deal more Federal funds – promises that I happen to believe in both cases, but which don’t really bring me deep joy.
Anyway, the first thing to note is the one thing that is not an issue here, despite Kerry’s promise in the NEA TODAY that ‘you will never see a voucher proposal coming from my office as President’, is vouchers and choice. (Sorry, the interview doesn’t seem to be online, but I assume that the quote doesn’t need verification!) Both campaigns mention choice, and Kerry is on board with the right kind of charter programs, but Bush downplays choice, understanding that his important constituencies don’t care much about it. Vouchers, in particular, are not going to win votes for the Republicans, because floating voters, and most existing Republican voters, have no interest in them, and because the people who are interested – urban Black voters – are not about to defect to the Republicans over the issue.
Kerry’s website was revamped after the convention, and the most peculiar, not to say ludicrous, promise – that the Feds would make sure every teacher has voicemail – was removed. This is to Kerry’s credit, but I admit that it still worries me a bit that anyone could have even thought it up, let alone thought that it was something to make public as a priority.
On to the main points.
I’m too biased to be able to judge well who won or lost in the second debate; G.W. Bush makes my skin crawl. What did strike me was the different strategies that the two candidates employed. Kerry seemed to be trying to do two things, quite deliberately, in his answers. First, he was very obviously trying to combat the Republican talking-point that he’s a pessimist. He referred to himself explicitly as an optimist at one point, and several of his answers were all about his hopes for the future. Second, he seemed to be reaching out to Republican-leaning undecided voters who were disenchanted with Bush – at every possible opportunity, he mentioned Republicans like Hagel, Lugar and McCain who have criticized the administration in one way or another. Bush, in contrast, seemed to me to be more interested in shoring up his core vote among conservatives. As I say, I came into this with a bias – still, these are the things that jumped out at me while I was watching the debate (apart from Kerry’s fluffing the response to Bush’s answer about mistakes, which many others in the blogosphere have written about already).
A. Friday fun link: Back in the day, after the death of Suck but before the rise of the Poor Man, Modern Humorist was arguably the most consistently funny site on the web. They had a fake preview for Radiohead’s Kid A that’s still on my list.
B. Friday not-so-fun links: Eric Alterman and Paul McLeary’s column on the torture provisions in H.B 10.
Congressman Markey’s amendment (which would have stripped out the torture provisions) did not come up for a vote. An amendment to substitute the Senate version of the bill came up last night. As Katherine notes:
The Senate version of the bill has a stronger national intelligence director with budgetary and personnel authority, strengthens anti-nuclear programs, and generally follows the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations much more closely than the House bill. It does not contain the anti-immigration or torture-outsourcing legalization provisions of the House bill. It passed the Senate by a 96-2 vote. All members of the 9/11 commission support the Senate version, as does the 9/11 Families Steering committee.
This amendment failed on a near party-line vote. Eight Republicans voted for the amendment, 212 against. If I understand correctly, the bill is likely to pass with the torture provisions intact, but there’s still hope for the conference committee. If I’m right, I’ll post the members of the committee as soon as I know them. If I’m wrong about any of this (which I might be), I’ll correct as soon as possible.
It’s times like these when Mickey Kaus’s whizzy “I’m a Democrat who hates Democrats!” act looks a lot less cute.
UPDATE: Katherine notes that the House is still going to vote on the Hostettler amendment, which tones down the language on outsorucing torture without eliminating it. Among other things, it instructs the Department of State to “seek diplomatic assurances” that a suspect not be tortured. This would probably make the deportation of Arar retrospectively legal (ANOTHER UPDATE: maybe not), as Syria assured us that he would not be tortured.
Markey is asking his colleagues to vote no on both the Hostettler amendment and final passage.
The White House has unambiguously stated that it does not support the “extraordinary rendition” provisions.
The president did not propose and does not support this provision. He has made clear that the United States stands against and will not tolerate torture and that the United States remains committed to complying with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Consistent with that treaty, the United States does not expel, return or extradite individuals to countries where the United States believes it is likely that they will be tortured.
ALBERTO R. GONZALES
Counsel to the President
Washington
I’m probably naive- we’ll find out soon enough. But that’s a clear, praiseworthy denunciation of the provisions in question. This leaves Hastert, Hostettler, and other supporters of these provisions without a fig leaf, doesn’t it? The 9/11 commission doesn’t want it, the Justice Department doesn’t want it, and President Bush doesn’t want it. It violates common decency, conservative principle, and 200 years of history. How can they stand up for them?
(I’m really not interested in nailing the White House for a flip-flop. If it’s true that they caved because of political pressure, good for them. Maybe they caved because of principle. Maybe it was a miscommunication. Either way, it’s a blessing, and they deserve praise for it.)
It also gives pro-Bush bloggers a hook to promote this story. President Bush denounces torture! But the provision still needs to be defeated. Pile on, guys!
