Posts Tagged ‘Bush’
Even More
* Chilling fact of the night: “Texas uses fourth grade reading scores to project the number of prison cells they’re going to need 10 years later.”
* LGM has your Wisconsin pre-postmortem.
* Robert Reich is teasing an imminent Obamacare ruling, claiming Roberts wants to uphold the law.
* Even Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Won’t Say The Affordable Care Act Is Unconstitutional.
* How Wes Anderson Soundtracks His Movies. Another Wes Anderson interview.
* And tonight’s dystopia: Behold the London Olympics’ Creepy ‘Brand Exclusion Zone.’
The most carefully policed Brand Exclusion Zone will be around the Olympic Park, and extend up to 1km beyond its perimeter, for up to 35 days. Within this area, officially called an Advertising and Street Trade Restrictions venue restriction zone, no advertising for brands designated as competing with those of the official Olympic sponsors will be allowed. (Originally, as detailed here, only official sponsors were allowed to advertise, but leftover sites are now available). This will be supported by preventing spectators from wearing clothing prominently displaying competing brands, or from entering the exclusion zone with unofficial snack and beverage choices. Within the Zone, the world’s biggest McDonald’s will be the only branded food outlet, and Visa will be the only payment card accepted.
Weekend!
* “This used to be a forest?” The age of extreme oil.
* This is such a simple point, but it sort of needs to be shouted from the rooftops: to change the basic and fundamental framework of the law in response to the crisis of the moment – or what is deemed to be a crisis – is to clarify that the law is a dead letter, like a fire insurance policy that is not valid in cases of fire. Aaron’s talking specifically about the current crisis in Quebec, but the point is widely applicable to the last forty years of public life in the U.S., accelerating since 2000.
* “The cruelest thing you can do to Kerouac,” Hanif Kureishi has a character say in The Buddha of Suburbia, “is reread him at thirty-eight.” If that was true, I wondered as I opened the first two volumes of the Library of America’s ongoing series of the complete novels, then what of Vonnegut at a decade older still?
* From the Dan Harmon files: Community and Dan Harmon’s Imploding Author Function. The Darkest Timeline. Daniel Fienberg. Josef Adalian. Maureen Ryan.
* Bumper sticker of the month: MY OTHER CAR IS A STUDENT LOAN.
* Because it’s there: Oldest Woman to Climb Mount Everest Breaks Her Own Record.
* NAACP Endorses Marriage Equality.
* Science proves my script for Sherlock Holmes and Hamlet Meet Dracula is a guaranteed blockbuster.
* And once again mightygodking solves Hollywood’s problems, free of charge.
Tuesday Night Quick Links
* Michael Bérubé introduces the MLA’s new Academic Workforce Data Center.
* If the Court does declare the act unconstitutional, it would have ruled that Congress lacks the power to adopt what it thought the most effective, efficient, fair, and politically workable remedy—not because that national remedy would violate anyone’s rights, or limit anyone’s liberty in ways a state government could not, or be otherwise unfair, but for the sole reason that in the Court’s opinion our constitution is a strict and arbitrary document that denies our national legislature the power to enact the only politically possible national program. If that opinion were right, we would have to accept that our eighteenth- century constitution is not the enduring marvel of statesmanship we suppose but an anachronistic, crippling burden we cannot escape, a straitjacket that makes it impossible for us to achieve a just national society.
* Guantanamo Lawyers: Obama Gets Away With Legal Moves Bush Wouldn’t Have.
* A Woman’s Lifetime Earnings Lost To Pay Gap Could Feed A Family Of Four For 37 Years.
* Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.
* If global warming weren’t a myth I might actually be a little nervous.
Monday Lunchtime Links
* Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board.
* Facts are stupid things: Growth In Government Spending Under President Obama Slower Than During Bush, Reagan Administrations. But don’t worry! The White House’s generous offer for even more cuts is still on the table.
* Are video games just propaganda and training tools for the military?
“For decades the military has been using video-game technology,” says Nina Huntemann, associate professor of communication and journalism at Suffolk University in Boston and a computer games specialist. “Every branch of the US armed forces and many, many police departments are using retooled video games to train their personnel.”
Like much of early computing, nascent digital gaming benefited from military spending. The prototype for the first home video games console, the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, was developed by Sanders Associates, a US defence contractor. Meanwhile, pre-digital electronic flight simulators, for use in both military and civilian training, date back to at least the second world war.
Later, the games industry began to repay its debts. Many insiders note how instruments in British Challenger 2 tanks, introduced in 1994, look uncannily like the PlayStation’s controllers, one of the most popular consoles of that year. Indeed, warfare’s use of digital war games soared towards the end of the 20th century.
“By the late 1990s,” says Nick Turse, an American journalist, historian and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, “the [US] army was pouring tens of millions of dollars into a centre at the University of Southern California – the Institute of Creative Technologies – specifically to build partnerships with the gaming industry and Hollywood.”
* Daniel Engber at Slate has your Apple apologetics.
But Daisey’s version wasn’t even substantially true. It was substantially false. The version of the story that aired on the radio gave listeners a clear and false impression of the abuses at Foxconn. It inflated the prevalence and massaged the data. How much deeper could the lies have gone?
…
Apple employees are being mistreated in China, but perhaps not so much or so often that it really matters to most people, harsh as that may sound.
Related: zunguzungu on The McNulty Gambit.
* In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that corporate donations to campaign Super PACs were legal because there was no reason to think they led to “corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This was a remarkably specious argument in the first place, but now we’re apparently going to test it to destruction.
* More on the SCOTUS beat: If you believe that the Court’s conservative majority is itching to strike down Obamacare, then the task is to launder this decision of partisan motivation. The Paul Clement court.
* Still more: Obamacare on Trial: Case of the Century?
* If the hole in the ozone layer were discovered today, we’d let the planet burn.
* A Critical Look at the Future of Zoos.
* Fresh from arguing that the female orgasm doesn’t exist, science now concludes women can have orgasms from exercising. Make up your mind, science!
Arc of History Watch
Here, too, this Court finds that Congress cannot, like an ostrich, merely bury its head in the sand and wait for danger to pass, especially at the risk of permitting continued constitutional injury upon legally married couples. The fact that the issue is socially divisive does nothing to relieve the judiciary of its obligation to examine the constitutionality of the discriminating classifications in the law.
A Bush appointee has found DOMA unconstitutional. Your move, Justice Kennedy…
Lots of Thursday Links
* Santorum leading in Ohio. Obama leading everywhere.
* You had me at hello: Soviet Space Propaganda Posters.
* Part two of Boston Review‘s interview with David Graeber is up.
DJ: In my most cynical days as an academic, I thought of a professorship as the carrot that the establishment offers to make sure that smart people don’t run amok. “Give them a nice little office and a job that’s very stable, and put them in the ivory tower, and they won’t cause any trouble.”
DG: Did you ever read C.B. Macpherson’s theory of the university? It’s similar to that, and it’s actually quite clever. He makes the argument that universities have traditionally fulfilled a kind of court jester role. What is the problem you have if you’re the guy in charge, if you’re a king? It’s that you’re surrounded by yes-men. So there’s nobody there who’s going to tell you if you have a really bad idea. They’ll agree with anything you say. So you need someone who will actually point out when you’re going off the tracks. You’ll also need to make sure that person isn’t taken seriously. So you get a hunchbacked dwarf to tell you a silly rhyme, telling you why your plan is idiotic. And you get to know that your plan is idiotic and think about it, and everybody else says, “OK, hunchbacked dwarf, you talk to the king, that’s fine.” Universities are pretty much the same thing. They’re there to come up with all the reasons why current policies are misguided, why, you know, the current economic systems might not be ideal. They come up with all the alternate perspectives, but they frame it in a way that nobody takes it particularly seriously or can even understand it.
* Life Lessons from The Lion King.
2) The rest of us should be happy to be ruled over by a group of predatory overlords who will devour us whole should we become sick or weak. Someday, eventually, in a vague and symbolic manner, karma will even things up.
3) Physical strength and charm are the defining characteristics for a leader; someone smart is probably just evil anyway. Don’t listen to them.
* The Angel Problem. Via MeFi.
* Ever since I taught The Sheep Look Up last week I see something Brunner predicted in the news nearly every day. Today’s depressing entry: Air Pollution Linked to Cognitive Decline in Women. Now, the dataset was all women, so it’s probably really “air pollution linked to cognitive decline in everyone.” Enjoy your weekend!
* …over the past year, the Obama administration has quietly unleashed a multiagency crackdown on medical cannabis that goes far beyond anything undertaken by George W. Bush. The feds are busting growers who operate in full compliance with state laws, vowing to seize the property of anyone who dares to even rent to legal pot dispensaries, and threatening to imprison state employees responsible for regulating medical marijuana. With more than 100 raids on pot dispensaries during his first three years, Obama is now on pace to exceed Bush’s record for medical-marijuana busts. “There’s no question that Obama’s the worst president on medical marijuana,” says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “He’s gone from first to worst.”
* New Jersey expected to approve gay marriage; Christie vows veto.
* “All-male House GOP leadership gets all-male witness panel to agree that all-male Catholic hierarchy should set contraceptives policy.” More here, here, here…
* The Wisconsin Uprising, One Year Later.
* And the Telegraph profiles the Boss.
He does, however, see cause for optimism. “The Occupy Wall Street movement has been powerful about changing the national conversation. The Tea Party set the conversation for a while but now people are talking about economic equality. That’s a conversation America hasn’t had for 20 years.”
There is also a religious dimension to Springsteen’s latest songs. The album shifts towards the spiritual uplift of gospel music in its rousing finale, evoking Jesus and the risen dead. “I got brainwashed as a child with Catholicism,” joked Springsteen, who says biblical imagery increasingly creeps into his songs almost unbidden. “Its like Al Pacino in The Godfather: I try to get out but they pull you back in! Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”
Happy Xmas, War Is Over
One of them, anyway: the Iraq War officially ends tomorrow.
It’s the Little Things
Taibbi on UC Davis in Context
What happened at UC Davis was the inevitable result of our failure to make sure our government stayed in the business of defending our principles. When we stopped insisting on that relationship with our government, they became something separate from us.
And we are stuck now with this fundamental conflict, whereby most of us are insisting that the law should apply equally to everyone, while the people running this country for years now have been operating according to the completely opposite principle that different people have different rights, and who deserves what protections is a completely subjective matter, determined by those in power, on a case-by-case basis.
‘I Can Say to You with Deepest Sincerity: If This Country and This Legislature Are In Thrall to Grover Norquist, We Haven’t Got a Prayer’
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Norquist expresses pride that the GOP has been so thoroughly transformed since the days of Reagan. “It’s a different Republican Party now,” he says. Norquist even goes so far as to liken the kind of Republicans common in Reagan’s day – those willing to raise taxes to strengthen the economy – to segregationists. The “modern Republican Party,” he says, would no sooner recognize a revenue-raiser than the “modern Democratic Party would recognize George Wallace.”
In Rolling Stone: How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich.
Why Obama Flinched
University of California at Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., left, the sixth highest-ranking member of the 2008 post-election transition team preparing Obama’s administration, revealed the team’s thinking on Sept. 2 in moderating a forum on 9/11 held by his law school (also known as Boalt Hall). Edley sought to justify Obama’s “look forward” policy on Bush-era lawbreaking that the president-elect announced on a TV talk show in January 2009.
But Edley’s rationale implies that Obama and his team fear the military/national security forces that he is supposed be commanding. It suggests also that Republicans have intimidated him right from the start of his presidency even though voters in 2008 rejected Republicans by the largest combined presidential-congressional mandate in recent U.S. history. Edley responded to our request for additional information by providing a description of the transition team’s fears, which we present below as an exclusive email interview. Among his important points is that transition officials, not Obama, agreed that he faced the possibility of a “revolt.”
Via @zunguzungu.
‘What We’re Finding Out Is That Obama’s Pathologically Pro-Establishment and Conflict-Averse DNA Was Funded by Party Insiders and Embraced by Liberal Constituency Groups in 2008 for a Reason’
Via the comments, it’s very hard to think a stronger warning sign for Democrats than a sentence like this one:
George W. Bush’s approval rating didn’t drop this low until Katrina hit.
The piece as a whole is the strong case for dumping Obama from the ticket:
Obama has ruined the Democratic Party. The 2010 wipeout was an electoral catastrophe so bad you’d have to go back to 1894 to find comparable losses. From 2008 to 2010, according to Gallup, the fastest growing demographic party label was former Democrat. Obama took over the party in 2008 with 36 percent of Americans considering themselves Democrats. Within just two years, that number had dropped to 31 percent, which tied a 22-year low.…
If would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic Party voters. He continued idiotic wars, bailed out banks, ignored luminaries like Paul Krugman, and generally did whatever he could to repudiate the New Deal. The Democratic Party should be the party of pay raises and homes, but under Obama it has become the party of pay cuts and foreclosures. Getting rid of Obama as the head of the party is the first step in reverting to form.
Historically, primarying a sitting president is tantamount to just giving the presidency to whomever the other side nominates. But if it’s Romney, given the extent of the Obama disaster, that’s a tradeoff that could potentially be reasonable; Romney would likely just be a more effective version of Obama, putting forth generally the same sorts of policies without the scorched-earth opposition from the other side. Let Romney 45 govern like Bush 41 and regroup for 2016/2020.
If it’s Perry, Bachmann, or Palin, on the other hand, rolling over seems completely suicidal, no matter how bad Obama is and will continue to be.
Of course, on the third hand, even if he remains on the ticket it’s increasingly hard to see how Obama gets reelected under these circumstances at all. Recalling Rortybomb’s well-linked post about the difference between losing badly and losing well, defeat with dignity is better than defeat without it.
Thursday Roundup
* In sum, nobody — and I mean nobody — was talking about how weak the presidency supposedly is before Barack Obama was inaugurated: neither in the domestic nor foreign policy realm. Greenwald is debating Scott Lemieux from Lawyers, Guns, and Money, whose posts on the subject are here and here.
* Over my friend Traxus’s objections, Elizabeth Warren will run for Senate. Sorry bro.
* In CounterPunch: Who Will Save Libya From Its Western Saviours?
* “The man sitting in front of you is not a so-called statesman, but a completely normal person”: Mikhail Gorbachev at 80.
* Chart of the day: paid vacation in the developed world.
* Never forget: Economic contraction is a policy choice.
* Tom Coburn forgets how dog whistles are supposed to work.
* Peter Singer: The Troubled Life of Nim Chimpsky.
* And two months from now it will have always been appropriate for lawyers to call themselves “Dr.” Looking forward to it.
Truth and Reconciliation in Hogwarts
At such a moment of deliverance, it is natural to feel elation and closure — to allow ourselves the brief comfort of imagining that the drama, so meticulously documented by J.K. Rowling, is over. But if history teaches us anything (consider the bitter legacy still lingering from the 17th-century Goblin Wars or the recent experience of American Muggles in Iraq and Afghanistan), it is that the defeat of Voldemort by Harry Potter may have been the easy part. Indeed, one might even say it was child’s play. The hard work of postwar stabilization still lies ahead.
…
Surviving Death Eaters will have to be brought to justice or reintegrated into magical society. Long-standing rifts among magical communities that the war widened must be healed. Most of all, we must ensure that the values that triumphed in the final battle — tolerance, pluralism, and respect for the dignity of all magical and non-magical creatures alike — are reflected in the institutions and arrangements that emerge from the conflict. What ultimately matters is not just whether something evil was defeated, but whether something good is built in its place.
‘Fiscal Irresponsibility’
A brief history of the U.S. national debt, from Steve Benen.
