Psychopolitik 2.0

So, among the issues next up for the Supreme Court is lethal injections, specifically whether they constitute cruel & unusual punishment. My personal view is that the two concepts can actually be split.

Ok, you can pick your jaw up off the floor now, I’ll explain…

Consider the process taken to administer a lethal injection: the person being strapped in, the chemicals involved, the fact that even though this person is being deliberately killed they still do an alcohol swab on the area where the needle is to go in. If you ask me, an inordinate amount of process is being used for such a base purpose, if this scenario is anything, it’s unusual.

That said, the alternative to that, within the assumption that the death penalty itself is acceptable, would be inherently to get more barbaric about it — firing squad, electrocution, drowning, that kind of thing. It’d be a more honest communication of intent, but at the same time it’d remove the veneer of detachment from the act. This way, it’d be “normal” (people aren’t usually killed by being administered hospital-quality drugs while strapped to a gurney, complete with witnesses…), but all but the sickest mind would agree it’s needlessly malevolent, thus cruel.

Frankly, I find it disgusting that we bicker over how to kill, rather than asking why we do it. You can’t argue self-defense when someone is already locked up.

(cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats)

Gee, it sure is nice to know that absolutely nothing else is going on in the world:

A billion-dollar battle over selling sports drinks and “enhanced” water in public schools has spilled into Congress and threatens to derail a major attempt to cut back the sale of junk food from school vending machines and snack bars.

In an attempt to limit the sale of high-calorie sodas, candy bars and other snacks in schools, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has introduced a bill that would have the government set new nutritional standards for the foods and drinks that schools sell to students outside cafeterias. But just what those standards should be is the issue.

Public health advocates want the standards to ban the sale of Gatorade and Powerade, which typically contain as much as two-thirds the sugar of sodas and more sodium, as well as sweetened waters such as VitaminWater and SoBe Life Water. Excessive sodium intake by young people could fuel a surge in high blood pressure, which until recently was considered a health threat only in later life, they said.

So, let me get this straight: you have government take over education, gradually assume responsibilities as part of that power derived from thin air that were previously the domain of parents, offload to a captive audience excess production (thanks to agriculture “policy”) while pretending it’s a gesture of concern for the poor, & in the process of blaming the failure of the State on a false stinginess on the part of the public invite corporate sponsors to slap logos on anything possible, and the response to the inevitable is to bitch about replacing Boneheaded Central Control Rule A with Boneheaded Central Control Rule B?

The trade group representing Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other bottlers, whose annual sales of sports drinks reached $7.5 billion last year, counters that sports drinks and sweetened waters are lower in calories, “appropriate” for high school students and “essential” to young athletes. In 2006, sports drinks were the third fastest growing beverage category in the United States, after energy drinks, such as Red Bull, and bottled water, according to the trade journal Beverage Digest.

Under current law, meals served in school cafeterias must meet some standards, but snack bars, school stores and vending machines may sell anything that contains at least trace amounts of protein, vitamins and minerals. The result: Many students make a meal out of a bag of chips, a sports drink and a chocolate bar. (emphasis mine)

Well damn, when you psychologically neuter the adults, then what exactly do you expect the kids to do?
As should be obvious by now, the real issue isn’t the rules.  It’s who is making them in the first place.

Sad, yet not surprising:

Esad Ismael broke the most important promise he ever made.

As his father lay on his deathbed two years ago, Ismael, 43, vowed never to sell his family’s home. His father and grandfather had spent all their savings to build the sprawling two-story house in Baghdad’s wealthy Mansour district 70 years ago. Family memories were tucked between every tile on the floor.

But Ismael, a Sunni clothing merchant, was living in an area that was falling under the control of the Mahdi Army, Iraq’s largest Shiite militia. Mindful of his promise to his dying father, he refused to move even after he began finding death threats pasted to his front door. After his brother was murdered, he gave up.

“It’s bad that I sold our home, but what is worse is that I sold it for only 145 million dinars,” Ismael said, naming a price equivalent to about $118,000 — less than half the house’s appraised value in late 2003. “It’s an insult to my father to sell it so low. But what choice did I have? They would have killed us.”

With hundreds of thousands of Baghdad residents having fled their homes for the relative safety of segregated neighborhoods or foreign countries, a clandestine system of buying and selling property off the books has supplanted more traditional real estate practices. If families being pushed out are lucky, they are able to sell their homes for some small price, as Ismael did. Wait too long, and their houses might be seized at gunpoint.

Consider it a more direct form of Eminent Domain…

I swear, it takes wit the likes of which I don’t recall seeing in a long time to not only completely ether someone in an economics discussion, but have people entertained by it to the point of chuckling.  Jon Stewart recently had Alan Greenspan on as a guest, and exposed just how much of a contradictory sellout he was — Brad has a clip in case you missed it.

Looking at Slate, saw two articles that really show the range on that site — by which I mean range of IQs:

Exhibit A: Michael Kinsley points out how the federal student loan program is a huge blowjob for banks & lobbyists, in the process differentiating between market order & corporatism.  Excerpt:

Student loans are the clearest example of the common Republican confusion between free-market capitalism and business. Capitalism is an economic system that is held, with some justification, to be the best guarantor of prosperity. Business can be capitalism in action, or it can be something entirely different. There is very little about the student loan program that has anything to do with free-market capitalism. Yet whenever the student loan system comes under criticism, lobbyists, “industry” leaders, and supportive politicians haul out the same old clichés as if they were defending Adam Smith’s famous pin factory itself. During the recent reform bill debate in the House, for example, a Republican from Texas, Jeb Hensarling, declared that the very notion of reducing the subsidy to private companies was “all part of a Democratic tax-and-spend program.” (emphasis mine)

Now obviously he doesn’t take this realization of the intersection between money & politics to its logical conclusion — he is a statist, after all — but it’s a start at least.

Exhibit B: Will Saletan, after taking note of millions from US hedge funds bankrolling high-tech surveillance systems in China (obviously for use by the Chinese government), pulls the following quip out of his ass:

Human Nature’s view: The problem with libertarianism is that the first thing people do with freedom is take away the freedom of others.

[Guinness commercial guy #1 voice] “So you see, because some people are willing to use their money to perpetuate a police state in hopes of profit, people don’t deserve freedom.  Those who claim to want liberty are just elitists who want to enslave people.”

[Guinness commercial guy #2 voice] “Because of the hypocrisy of a slim minority, we should take away freedom to keep people from taking away freedom?!?  BRILLIANT!”

In case you can’t tell, I need a drink after reading such tripe.

The timing for suddenly getting chatty couldn’t have been more opportunistic:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his new book, bashes President Bush for not responsibly handling the nation’s spending and racking up big budget deficits.

A self-described “libertarian Republican,” Greenspan takes his own party to task for forsaking conservative principles that favor small government.

“My biggest frustration remained the president’s unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending,” Greenspan wrote.

Bush took office in 2001, the last time the government produced a budget surplus. Every year after that, the government has been in the red. In 2004, the deficit swelled to a record $413 billion. […]

The ex-Fed chief writes that he laments the loss of fiscal discipline. “‘Deficits don’t matter,’ to my chagrin, became part of Republicans’ rhetoric.”

How exactly do you lose something you never had? Seriously, considering who nominated him to the Fed in the first place you’d think he’d know better than to assert the old “Republicans used to give a fuck back in the Good Old Days” canard. It’s fact time, click the thumbnail:

That’s “bad then, worse now” there. If that’s the standard that Greenspan is talking about then he’s basically writing off anything short of utter disaster as nitpicking.

Well, here’s one way to find out who’s seriously up for nomination to replace Gone-zo: when people say “oh no, not him“, measure the decibels…

Senate Democrats will block Ted Olson from succeeding Alberto Gonzales as attorney general if President Bush nominates him, Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday.

“Ted Olson will not be confirmed,” Reid, D-Nev., said in a written statement. “I intend to do everything I can to prevent him from being confirmed as the next attorney general.”

The comment gave weight to Republican warnings that Olson, a former solicitor general, would face brutal confirmation hearings and that the White House can’t afford a fight now over who will head the troubled federal law enforcement agency.

“It would be unfortunate to nominate someone who can’t be confirmed,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said earlier in the day.

Unfortunate, yes.  Pig-headed?  Of course.  At the same time though, it’d be fun to watch in that tragi-comic sense that is the sole redeeming quality of politics itself — for that reason, watch him do it.  I withdraw my previous guess, this is more Bush’s speed.

The spin on Iraq still isn’t working, another section of the Patriot Act gets rightly struck down as unconstitutional, and people are basically writing off Bush entirely.  Gee, look who shows up among all this:

Ending a nearly three-year absence from public view, a dark-bearded Osama bin Laden surfaced yesterday in a new video in which he repeatedly taunted the Bush administration but made no overt threats of renewed terrorist attacks.

The al-Qaeda leader appeared visibly older and spoke in somber tones as he delivered a rambling, 25-minute monologue that included a lengthy tirade against Western capitalism sprinkled with references to recent news events and cultural and political figures.

Addressing his message to “the people of America,” bin Laden predicted failure for U.S. forces in Iraq and warned against what he described as the continued oppression and humiliation of Muslims by the West. […]

In Sydney, President Bush told reporters: “The tape is a reminder about the dangerous world in which we live. And it is a reminder that we must work together to protect . . . against these extremists who murder the innocent in order to achieve their political objectives.”

“I found it interesting that on the tape Iraq was mentioned, which is a reminder that Iraq is a part of this war against extremists,” Bush continued. “If al-Qaeda bothers to mention Iraq, it is because they want to achieve their objectives in Iraq, which is to drive us out and to develop a safe haven.”

Give it a few days and check those poll numbers.  By now, Bin Laden is really Bush’s only friend, ironic since him still being out there is glaring indication of failure to reasonable people.
What REALLY amuses me though is some of what was said…

He chides not only Bush — a leader who he says “harvests nothing but failure” — but also the Democratic leadership of Congress. “Why have the Democrats failed to stop this war, despite them being the majority?” he asks, according to the translation provided by the SITE group. Later, answering his own question, he argues that the failure of Americans to stop the Iraq war was attributable to the political dominance of large corporations that “benefit from this continuation.” (emphasis mine)

Rants about “capitalism”?  Criticism of Democrats for not ending the war in Iraq?   Pointing out how a few actually benefit from this clusterfuck?  Either “Adam the American” — who is already being talked about as having wrote part of this — knows jack squat about how politics works here (these kind of critiques coming from Bin Laden makes irrational stubbornness seem like strength), or the whole reason this was released at all was to attempt to discredit any argument that could be twisted to sound like this.  Next time you point out to one of the dead-enders how much of a total waste invading Iraq was and will continue to be, watch how much quicker they say “oh, so you agree with the terrorists?”.

If Osama didn’t exist, they’d create him.

We have another nomination for Most Pointless Statement of the Obvious here: A Reuters article on a study showing that  — *gasp* — rock stars tend to die quicker than the average person.  What’s next, an article explaining why babies crap themselves?

Mr. “Double Guantanamo” brings us even more of his deep thoughts:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says that if terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city while he was president he would retaliate “in a very dramatic and clear way.”

Posed that scenario while campaigning Friday in this early primary state, Romney said he didn’t want to say much more.

“The answer is you would retaliate and you’d retaliate in a very dramatic and clear way. I don’t want to be terribly more specific than that,” the former Massachusetts governor said.

“But there’s no question that people understand that the reason that we have the thousands upon thousands of nuclear warheads we have is that we intend to protect ourselves. And I would never shrink from protecting the American nation, the American people, nor shrink from retaliation if somebody used something as awful as a nuclear device. We will be safe.”

Yeesh…where to start with this one?

-Nuclear weapons are inherently non-defensive weapons, since the fallout & size of the blast inevitably kills tons of innocent people, so to say “protection” is the reason we have a ton of them makes no sense. You don’t use nukes unless you just want to kill a shitload of people.

-Saying there’d be a huge response if we were nuked is really pointless to say, since it’s common sense. Considering that some people were calling for nukes to be used right after 9/11, eye-for-an-eye would be demanded so loud & quickly there’d be no attempt to figure out who actually did the initial attack.

-The way he states this out of the blue sounds almost as if he WANTS the opportunity to do it.

This fear-mongering for votes is sad as hell, since if anyone thought about what was said they’d run screaming the other direction.