November, 2007 archive
Madama Perjurfly 0
Steve at ASZ:
If forced to testify, Vitter should do his best to “demonstrate true contrition,†Holt said.
“You can survive any political situation if you conduct yourself with dignity,†Holt said. “Preserving your dignity, while extremely difficult in this situation, is still possible.â€
Charlie Black, a Republican strategist and former Republican National Committee spokesman, said Vitter must decide whether it’s worth trying to quash the subpoena.
“I might go ahead and do it rather than having a protracted fight over whether he’ll have to do it,†Black said.
If Vitter takes the stand, Black said, the key will be to offer as little new information — and fodder for critics — as possible.
Seems typical Republican advice to me. Neither of these guys recommends that Mr. Vitter tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Evidently they don’t understand American jurisprudence or something.
“Demonstrating true contrition” and “feeling true contrition” are, of course, not the same thing.
Attitudes, Schmattitudes (Reprise) 0
About a week ago, I blogged about the futility and fatuousness of self-styled “diversity training,” which, frankly, I view as a fraud and deception foisted on the training consumer.
The local rag (the one to which I don’t subscribe because I want a paper that takes more than 5 minutes to read) had a good follow-up story today.
This quote illustrates what happens when bad training is implemented by incompetent trainers:
Schneer, who is Jewish, said he is concerned for a friend on another floor of his Russell Complex dormitory who is a devout Christian. Schneer said his friend wound up standing alone on the “No” side of the room when students in the Residence Life program were asked if they approved of gay marriage.
“Everyone else was on the other side,” Schneer said. “He’s a great guy, a nice person, but I ran into some girls at a party and they talked trash about him. I asked them, ‘Is he a bad person?’ But they’ve already made their decision. People who are different or outspoken are looked down upon. Things like this are tearing up the ideological diversity this nation was founded on.”
Lanan, a geology major, said people who objected to the program have been wrongly accused of intolerance.
A program which is supposed to foster tolerance, but, which, instead, creates it, deserves any bad publicity that it gets.
(Full disclosure: I believe the evidence resoundingly shows that sexual orientation is born, not made, and, because it is born, not made, cannot be changed.)
In case of the student described in this piece: If, whatever his personal beliefs and attitudes, he treats all persons in the same way, who the hell cares what he believes? His beliefs are his own.
Only his behaviors are the concern of his family, his friends, and the larger society–and only to the extent they affect his family, his friends, and the larger society.
(In other words, if he wants to show one face to his family and friends and another face to the larger society, that is, so long as no one is harmed, his privilege. Where does common courtesy end and hypocrisy begin? When there is harm. If there is no harm, the duplicity, if such there is, is between him and God, but society doesn’t have a stake in it.)
Lies, Damned Lies, and Bush Speeches 0
Glenn Greenwald:
When the Founders drafted the Constitution, they had a clear understanding of tyranny. They also had a clear idea about how to prevent it from ever taking root in America. Their solution was to separate the government’s powers into three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Each of these branches plays a vital role in our free society. Each serves as a check on the others. And to preserve our liberty, each must meet its responsibilities — and resist the temptation to encroach on the powers the Constitution accords to others.
(snippage)
And when the Gonzales-led Justice Department issued a 42-page single-spaced Memorandum in 2006 justifying the President’s decision to spy on Americans in violation of our “laws,” it was explained to us that the President is the “sole organ for the Nation in foreign affairs”; that “the President has independent authority to repel aggressive acts by third parties even without specific congressional authorization, and courts may not review the level of force selected”; and that statutes restricting the President’s actions relating to war “could probably be read as simply providing ‘a recommendation’ that the President could decline to follow at his discretion.”
These are the still-valid premises that led the Constitution-revering George W. Bush to spend the last six years ignoring and violating statutes whenever he wanted to, keeping Congress completely in the dark about what he was doing, and issuing one signing statement after the next explaining why he has no obligation to comply with what Congress adorably calls their “laws.”
It boggles the mind.
Via Andrew Sullivan.
Why Doesn’t It Stop? 0
Steve has a truth theory. I urge you to read the whole post–he covers a lot more ground than this excerpt indicates:
I’ll answer my own question. We do so because the Bush administration places more weight upon cozying up to corporate interests and protecting their profits than he does upon looking out for the welfare of American citizens. Should the two concerns intersect, all the better; should they not, then we apparently turn a blind eye to danger.
Oh, My 0
This sounds like Bushie security.
Except for the lack of waterboarding.
He was reading The Unknown Terrorist, a fictional thriller that tells the story of a ballet dancer who has a dodgy one-night stand with someone who is suspected of plotting to explode a bomb. The dancer then falls under suspicion because of the association, and is subject to a “paranoid witch-hunt.”
Planted Questions in Candidate Debates 0
There was a small furor over a planted question at the Democratic candidates’ debate last week.
(Full disclosure: I avoid the debates, whether in primaries or general elections because I think they are more of a waste of time than Windows solitare.)
Susie has more.
Waterboarding’s Glorious Past 0
I’ve done a lot of research on the water cure.
Despite the fulminations of the Wingnuttysphere to somehow claim that it is not torture, it is, quite clearly, torture.
The issue to be discussed is not whether or not waterboarding is torture.
The issue to be discussed is whether Americans should torture or whether torturing persons violates the ideals upon which the United States of America was founded.
Those who argue that waterboarding is not torture are just trying to weasel out of facing the moral decision.
And those who would say that waterboarding is the “American way,” have good company.
I Picked the Wrong Mother 0
Oh, my.
According to the Telegraph, the clothes-shedding strumpet was dispatched to Nottingham’s Arnold Hill School and Technology College at the behest of the boy’s mum, who also asked his teacher to film the event.
The stripper entered the classroom halfway through the lesson, and then, as a fellow pupil recounted to the Daily Mail: “She asked the lad to stand up, which he did, and told him he had been a very naughty boy because he hadn’t been doing his homework. Then she put on some Britney Spears music and got out a collar and lead from her bag and told him to put them on.
Lugg . . . 0
. . . was the manservant of Albert Campion in the Margery Allingham mysteries.
In contrast, this is a lugnut:
The unnamed 66-year-old, from Southworth in Washington state, had been repairing the vehicle for two weeks and apparently lost his rag with the last bolt on the right rear wheel which refused to budge.
He let the wheel have it “from arm’s length”, and was “peppered with ricocheting buckshot and debris” for his trouble. He then enjoyed a visit to Tacoma General Hospital with “severe but not life threatening injuries”. His feet, legs, and abdomen were worst affected, but the damage extended up to his chin.
The Midas Touch 0
The latest on the s(pl)urge:
Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, deputy commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division, complained last week that Iraqi politicians appear out of touch with everyday citizens. “The ministers, they don’t get out,” he said. “They don’t know what the hell is going on on the ground.”
Dan Froomkin has more.
I have been amusing myself today, in between cooling towers, by trying to think of anything that the Current Federal Administration has touched that hasn’t turned to shit.
The economy?
The Federal budget? (Oh, yeah, there used to be a surplus, before it was given away to the rich. Remember?)
The justice system?
The tax code?
The War in Afghanistan?
The War in Iraq? (See the opening citation.)
It’s the Midas touch.
Drumbeats 0
Susie hears the tom-toms.
Swampwater 0
And this surprises us how?
The shooting deaths of three other civilians in the same incident may have been within guidelines for the use of deadly force, officials said.
FBI investigators who spent two weeks in Baghdad last month have briefed prosecutors on their findings, but a formal “prosecutive memo” laying out the key elements of the case has not been sent to the Justice Department yet. Justice will make the final decision on whether to go forward with legal proceedings against the Blackwater personnel.
The investigators found no evidence to support Blackwater’s public insistence that the guards shot only in response to gunfire directed at them.
Fuel Prices 1
As the treasurer for my church, I get to pay the bills and shoot my mouth off in meetings.
We got our first fuel oil delivery for the winter season.
Fuel oil is running $2.99 a gallon.
More than gasoline.
Oh, yeah, and the War in Iraq was going to pay for itself.
Near Death Experience 1
No, I didn’t leave my body and float above it.
I nearly died.
I’m driving down Delaware 1 past Dover Air Force Base, admiring the flight line of C-5s. It was raining heavily off and on all morning.
I’m in the left lane. There’s a van in the right lane two car lengths ahead of me.
And suddenly the world disappeared.
Muddy water covered my windshield for at least two seconds.
I could not see anything through the windshield.
Fortunately, the road is straight at that point. I backed off the exhilerater and just hung on.
I was still shaking when I got to the cooling tower place 20 minutes later.
All I can guess is that the van hit a patch of standing water and splashed me out.
“. . . until Dead” 1
The local rag had two columns on the death penalty yesterday.
One was by Jonathan Last, a conservative with whom I seldom agree, but whose thoughtfulness and reasoning I respect. Last’s central conclusion (full disclosure–my opinions on the death penalty are stated here):
Yet the list of such hypotheticals can be counted on one hand. The overarching case is there to be made that the death penalty should be put aside in America – not because it’s unconstitutional, or because it doesn’t work well, but because it’s wrong. And this should be accomplished not by courts torturing the law, but by citizens and legislators changing the laws.
Waste of Newsprint, on the other hand, cited a study which showed a decline in murders in years following an increase in executions, trumpeting it as proof of a deterrent effect for capital punishment:
Of course, he failed to note the study’s authors’ own caution:
74 fewer murders a year.
From 1998 to 2000, there were 12,658 murders in the United States.
74. Triple that to 232 to cover three years. That’s a 1.8% per cent reduction.
How do you say, “statistically insignificant”?
But, yeah, this is fairly typical of Waste of Newsprint’s reasoning.
Waste of Time.
Now, it has been a long time since I studied sociology, but I do recall reading a study that documented that severity of punishment is not a deterrent. Certainty of capture is.
As long as criminals pretty much reckon they won’t get caught, they don’t really think about severity of punishment. And, of course, those who commit crimes on impulse aren’t thinking of the consequences at all.
This link leads to some readings on the subject.
And, as usual on the Hypocrisy Watch, there was no mention of whether Senator Thompson should retire from politics and spend his remaining years with his family.
Now, I do have to say, Waste has a certain “Everyman” appeal.
He’s sort of like Fred Flintstone with a typewriter.
