Psychopolitik 2.0

Re: the pseudo-controversy about Farrakhan supporting Barack Obama, Glenn Greenwald exposes a glaring double-standard, one that’d make singing along with a Syl Johnson record oddly appropriate.

Here comes Mr. Broken Record…:

President Bush today urged Congress to pass legislation that would give telecom companies immunity from class-action lawsuits for cooperating with U.S. intelligence services in monitoring terrorist communications.

“Allowing these lawsuits to proceed would be unfair,” Bush said at a White House news conference. “If any of these companies helped us, they did so after being told by our country their assistance was legal.”

Wrong. “The country” told these people jack shit, the administration basically lied to them, using the formulation “when the government does it, it’s not illegal”. What they were doing was not as cut and dried as “monitoring terrorist communications” either, otherwise they could’ve easily gotten warrants like they were supposed to. Also, notice the convenient omission of the word suspected from that phrase?

Noting that the litigation process could lead to disclosure of surveillance techniques and make other countries less likely to cooperate with U.S. intelligence services, Bush said, “You cannot expect phone companies to participate if they feel like they’re going to be sued. It’s patently unfair.” Without impugning the motives of those seeking to sue, Bush said he suspected “they see a gravy train” and urged House leaders to act so calls to the United States from overseas can be monitored. (emphasis mine)

Curious turn of phrase by the writer of this article, wouldn’t you say? Put the word “impugn” into a dictionary search and you get the following: To attack as false or questionable; challenge in argument. Johanna Neuman, the LA Times staff writer involved, says that Bush isn’t attacking as false or questionable the motives behind the lawsuits, and then quotes Bush himself saying “they see a gravy train”. Me and Bush do come from drastically different cultures and generations, so there’s a chance of things being lost in translation, but last I recall “gravy train” was slang for easy money. In effect, he is claiming that the only reason anyone would have to sue is to get rich, with no regard whatsoever for the law. How is that not calling their motives questionable?

BTW: international calls involving the US already can be monitored, and have been able to be monitored for a long time. The sole catch is that you have to have a legitimate reason to do so, which is what the purpose of a warrant is. The court that dealt with such warrants had no problem whatsoever issuing them until the reign of Bush the 2nd. Josh Marshall observed that the amount of requests that had to be modified (meaning in their original form the warrants were rejected) before moving forward shot up drastically around 2003; in the year prior, the Justice Department apparently pissed off the FISA judges so badly that they made one of their rulings against them public — remember, this is supposed to be a “secret” court. To me, this suggests that the Bush Administration started to openly go overboard with the warrant requests, and initiated this whole blatantly criminal mess as a hissy fit against being told to take a hike.

“There are enough votes in the House to pass this bill,” Bush said. “House leaders need to put the bill on the floor and give professionals the tools they need.” Noting that phone companies are less likely to cooperate without protections, Bush said, “They’re facing billions of dollars of lawsuits. They have a responsibility to their shareholders.” (emphasis mine)

It’s already been established that they don’t need warrantless wiretaps to do their jobs, so this is a lie, plain and simple. As for the phone companies, that any of them cooperated shows what they expected from this administration. They knew there’d be an attempt to shield them, they just didn’t anticipate it not being rubber-stamped.

Eh, serves ‘em right for being so gullible, far as I’m concerned.

As is obvious now, the last semblance of intellect within what is for some reason still referred to as “conservatism” has clearly left this planet.  Earlier today, the intellectual “father” of “conservatism” just followed it to the exit.

Don’t get me wrong: he was an admitted elitist, and IMO culturally backwards.  But when it comes to direct opposition, I appreciate some discernible train of thought behind it.  I’ve shared drinks with people who couldn’t possibly be more opposed to my views, with nary a nod to it being awkward, because their views flowed from something.  Try doing that with someone ideologically raised on Rush Limbaugh — but call a lawyer first to defend you from the inevitable assault charge when you kick his teeth in.

A couple choice remarks on this from others: 

• John Cole notes how the fever swamp crowd at RedState would probably consider Buckley a traitor for observing how much of a failure Junior is.
• David Boaz uses more words than I would to say “damn, on the rare moments where he said the right thing the dumbasses completely ignored him anyway”.
• Jim Wilson describes him as his “gateway drug” on his way to libertarianism.  I had a similar experience, except mine was P.J. O’Rourke circa his Rolling Stone days.

Basically, other than Cunning Realist, if your name isn’t Andrew Sullivan and you genuinely consider yourself a “conservative” these days…you fail.

There’s been an awkward amount of blogfarms — sites consisting of a “blog” that does nothing more than search for anything with a keyword of the owners choosing in it, post an excerpt, and bury the rest of the page in advertising — linking to my site lately.  Needless to say, if I look at a site linking here and it doesn’t look like a human being wrote it, I’m deleting the trackback.

Ok, go about your business…

Jim Manzi, a recent guest blogger for Andrew Sullivan, makes a damn good point re: the value of all that information inevitably shared about ourselves in modern commerce.  Surely if these companies that want to sell us crap want to know our habits so badly they should be willing to pay US for it, right?

Argh…:

Sen. Barack Obama’s refusal to wear an American flag lapel pin along with a photo of him not putting his hand over his heart during the National Anthem led conservatives on Internet and in the media to question his patriotism.

Now Obama’s wife, Michelle, has drawn their ire, too, for saying recently that she’s really proud of her country for the first time in her adult life.

Conservative consultants say that combined, the cases could be an issue for Obama in the general election if he wins the nomination, especially as he runs against Vietnam war hero Sen. John McCain.

“The reason it hasn’t been an issue so far is that we’re still in the microcosm of the Democratic primary,” said Republican consultant Roger Stone. “Many Americans will find the three things offensive. Barack Obama is out of the McGovern wing of the party, and he is part of the blame America first crowd.”

Whoever had the bright idea that this was newsworthy should be fired.

First of all, it’s elephant-shit obvious: of course right-wingers are questioning his patriotism, they question everybody on that, every election year. For them if you disagree with them in the slightest, you’re anti-American, as they’ve defined their own ideology as what it means to be one. What would be a shock would be if they didn’t, because the day that claiming an opponent as unAmerican fell out of their playbook I would immediately jump out of the window, because that’s a sign the world has kicked into reverse and I’ve always been curious what it’d feel like if humans could fly.

Another thing they’ve missed here is that it helps the agenda of the wingers to have this get mainstream media play. See, our media, clinging to the idea that it is possible to be 100% objective, have a simplistic view of fairness. To them, every issue has two sides, no matter what, and both sides have to be treated as equally credible — “oh, they’re claiming a presidential candidate is anti-American, we must give their grievances a fair hearing!”. Because of this, claims that common sense would mercilessly rule out end up seen as debatable, and we hear them over and over again; unfortunately, some among us crack and accept it.

Even going by the most basic measure of value as news, one that even a toddler could agree to — freshness as a story — this fails. Funny thing is, the article itself acknowledges that!

Obama already is the subject of a shadowy smear campaign based on the Internet that falsely suggests he’s a Muslim intent on destroying the United States. Obama is a Christian and has been fighting the e-mail hoax, which also claims he doesn’t put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, and he’s been trying to correct the misinformation.

“Whenever I’m in the United States Senate, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,” Obama frequently tells voters. “I’ve been going to the same church for 20 years, praising Jesus,” he adds.

Like I said, they define what it means to be American as synonymous with their ideology. There is no reason to care what religion any politician follows, or even if they don’t follow one at all, and not being Christian has zilch to do with patriotism. Even if someone is a muslim, it doesn’t follow from there that they’re in league with al-qaeda. Obama being a politician, he naturally is hesitant to give this the response it really needs: “why the fuck do you care who I pray to anyway?”

Besides, gestures like wearing a flag pin, holding your hand to your heart for the pledge, or standing for the national anthem are meaningless. I remember going to football games and hearing the national anthem before the teams took the field, and half the crowd didn’t stand up. Now, does this mean there’s a 5th column of terrorist sympathizers among football fans? Or does it mean that after all that time of being in lines, from getting their tickets, to getting food & drinks, to turning in their stub, to squeezing past strangers to find their seat, they’re really glad to be able to sit the fuck DOWN and don’t feel like moving?

Rather than just disseminating the same pointless blather for the umpteenth time, what would be more useful would be an analysis of what is really meant by these kind of charges, including a brief history and a couple examples of the type of scum that actually DID follow the Patriotism Rules to the letter. But that would be too much work, not to mention “unfair”…

Edit: John Cole & Josh Marshall have more on this.  Well, Josh has some background info on the “source” for this story, while John has more pictures of scumbags wearing lapel pins, but every bit counts.

Shorter Robert Samuelson: “Change? What change?”

By Obama’s own moral standards, Obama fails. Americans “are tired of hearing promises made and 10-point plans proposed in the heat of a campaign only to have nothing change,” he recently said. Shortly thereafter he outlined an economic plan of at least 12 points that, among other things, would:

• Provide a $1,000 tax cut for most two-earner families ($500 for singles).

• Create a $4,000 refundable tuition tax credit for every year of college.

• Expand the child-care tax credit for people earning less than $50,000 and “double spending on quality after-school programs.”

• Enact an “energy plan” that would invest $150 billion in 10 years to create a “green energy sector.”

Whatever one thinks of these ideas, they’re standard goody-bag politics: something for everyone. They’re so similar to many Clinton proposals that her campaign put out a news release accusing Obama of plagiarizing. With existing budget deficits and the costs of Obama’s “universal health plan,” the odds of enacting his full package are slim.

Not to mention — in the case of the “investment” (read: wild throwing of tax dollars) towards green energy — inherently counter-intuitive. The entire reason such plans even get proposed is because of a huge blind spot in perspective when it comes to economics: statist-progressives assume that the dominance of non-green energy is entirely market-driven, and thus think any shift from the status quo requires activist government. How anyone can believe that that called out the war in Iraq as a war over oil puzzles me.

This is what irks me about the use of “CHANGE!” as a campaign rallying cry. Now, I’m approaching this from an obvious outsider view — I’m an anarchist in the long run, Obama and his supporters are not, this has not changed and in all likelihood will not. However, in the immediate term there are obvious things that, as long as the current system exists, can be reworked to (depending on whether it’s my perspective or theirs being emphasized) introduce some semblance of rationality to it or grease the wheels on the track away from it. The difference between such and the nibbling at the edges commonly proposed is that in some way the structure itself is reinterpreted.

Take energy, for example: the status quo is that oil is massively subsidized, both directly and in terms of systemic privileges cleaner sources typically don’t have, and the standard response to this is to subsidize the alt-fuel with the most political access — ethanol. A true change would be to in one fell swoop yank the breaks from the oil companies & shut them out of foreign policy discussions. Over time, the true cost would reveal itself, and people would demand the producers adjust. Since encouragement of centralized production would be a thing of the past, various smaller scale solutions would be used, saving money — and for my purposes, killing off one more rationale for the State.

Another example would be tax reform: Obama is proposing a few targeted breaks meant to encourage certain results, adding to the complexity of a system that’s already waaaay too big. What would be true change here? Try scrapping it for something simpler, yet still progressive, there’s options out there: a flat tax* with a high floor (exempt a relatively large amount & index to inflation), a modern adaptation of the Georgist land-value tax (consider who tends to own huge amounts of land…), the Automated Transaction Tax (progressive because the amount of such transactions rises disproportionately with income). Hell, even if they don’t want to go that far, a huge dent would be to do a kill’n’switch of the payroll tax with a carbon tax; while that wouldn’t accomplish what I would personally prefer, in terms of ending as many taxes at once as possible, it would at least streamline things and remove a direct burden on low-income workers.

Obama’s rhetoric screams “CHANGE!” at every opportunity, yet still merely shifts a little bit in the same hole. Despite this easily observable fact, which he himself has alluded to (i.e.: the interview where he sideways portrayed himself as a liberal Reagan) he’s treated like a one-man revolution. Shit like this is why, as a matter of principle, the most I hope for in this election & any other is for life to imitate art in a humorous way.

(* - the reason that the mainstream Left screams bloody murder at the mention of this is because the way the right-wing proposes it stuff like capital-gains & dividends would just go free — meaning a stockbroker wouldn’t be taxed but the guys who wash their Porsche would. It’d make more sense to just say “income is income is income, period”, and with a high enough floor it’d effectively be a class tax — which is what the first income tax put in place after the 16th Amendment passed was. This is not to say I agree with income tax itself, or the 16th Amendment — I do not — only that the precedent is set, and if progressives wish to go that direction for now it’s available. My personal preference is that, as long as the State exists, taxation be applied based on use of resources, whether in terms of separation of the commons or of answering the question “so, who uses the force of government more?”. Either one would be progressive without even considering income.)

(cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats)

Ok, this one is in the form of an essay.  Respond to the following:

Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer (D), struggling to close a $4.4 billion budget gap, has proposed making drug dealers pay tax on their stashes of illegal drugs. The new tax would apply to cocaine, heroin and marijuana, and could be paid with pre-bought “tax stamps” affixed to the bags of dope.

To make an easy example of this, I’ll review some responses at random out loud in front of the class.  Here goes, first answer…

“I guess if it moves, he’ll tax it,” said Republican state Sen. Martin J. Golden, who dubbed the proposal “the crack tax.”

Heh, that’s a funny one, Marvin.  Unfortunately, it’s also missing the point.  Next one…

Some opponents said that because cocaine and weed would be subject to the new levies, it should more aptly be called “the crack-pot tax.”

Not only did someone clearly copy Martin’s response, but they didn’t sign their paper.  I’ll be seeing them next year, for sure.  Let’s keep this going, and…oh, wait, Martin wrote something else on the back of his.  Sheesh, sloppy handwriting there.

“How do I explain to my 16-year-old son that we’re giving a certain legitimacy to marijuana, cocaine and heroin?” asked Golden, a former New York City police officer who represents a Brooklyn district. “We are taxing an illegal substance.” He added, “Is prostitution next?”

What legitimacy?  The tax stamps aren’t making the substances legal, if anything it’s making it even less “legitimate”.  No dealer in their right mind is going to bother getting these, and as a result they’re going to be charged with tax evasion on top of the drugs.  Stick with humor, because your logic isn’t working.  Let’s try another one…

On the other side of the aisle, some Democrats, too, were stunned by the plan. “My initial instinct is: I don’t understand it,” said Bill Perkins, a state senator from Harlem. “Most of the dealers I’m familiar with are petty crack dealers — most of them are crackheads. They are broke, to say the least. I just don’t understand how you impose a tax” on broke crackheads, he said.

Good point.  Although, I do wonder how you meet enough crackheads to know that.

Here’s Kevin’s response:

Taxing illegal drugs is more widespread than is generally known. At least 21 states have some form of tax for illicit drugs, although some of those laws have been challenged in courts, and others have fallen into disuse. Almost all the remaining drug-tax laws are used mainly by local law enforcement agencies as a way to seize drug money and fund counter-narcotics operations.

The controversial idea grew out of the efforts to fight bootleggers such as Al Capone during Prohibition — going after the bootleggers for unpaid taxes often required a lighter burden of proof than a criminal prosecution.

The history about it is spot on, I’m surprised.  Good going, Kevin.

One more?  Yeah, sure, since you guys got done so early.  Let’s see, how about…Jeff?

When Robert Megna, the New York tax commissioner, went to push the tax before a hearing at the state assembly, he was grilled by assembly member Jeffrion L. Aubry of Queens.

Aubry said he is concerned about figures compiled by a Queens College sociology professor, showing that between 1997 and 2006, about 360,000 New Yorkers were arrested for marijuana possession — usually small amounts in a single joint, or nickel or dime bags — and 85 percent of those arrested were black or Hispanic. Most of those received probation.

But Aubrey, in an interview, said he is concerned that adding a new tax would create more costs to the city by forcing police to impose a new charge: tax evasion.

“Our prison population has been declining,” Aubry said. “This runs counter to that. . . . The poor, and minorities, are the ones who end up arrested, convicted and sentenced.” Aubry vowed to fight what he called a “boneheaded” proposal. (emphasis mine)

See what Jeff did there, class?  Mr. Spitzer proposed this to supposedly deal with a budget shortfall, Jeff makes the case that it increases costs, both in terms of numbers AND lives potentially ruined, using this idea as example of how a political “solution” is in and of itself part of the problem.  If this critique were taken seriously, then Spitzer would have no choice but to scrap the whole thing, and maybe down the line he could question the entire “war on drugs” itself!

The rest of you will get your scores 1st thing when we next meet.  Also, we’ll be starting the next chapter, which is on the shifting definition of “public” in reference to land, & how it relates to gun laws.  Try not to forget everything on vacation, m’kay?

Vache Folle, using a classic joke setup, lays out exactly why organized religion sucks balls.  Read the whole thing.

BTW: Note what the bartender says in the story — great minds think alike, eh?

At the crossroads of the “stimulus package”, yet more bailouts of Big Financial, and the antics of Helicopter Ben, Balloon Juice commenter “RSA” sums the point of this mess up rather cleverly:

“Stop moneyboarding me! I can’t take it! I’ll go shopping, I promise!”

Above that one, “Conservatively Liberal” describes as “Communistic Capitalism/Capitalistic Communism” what I used to call “Corporate Socialism” until I realized that it was actually capitalism.  This cycle of appropriation so business interests can make deals that amount to verifiable insanity, then get the State to wipe their slate clean by shifting the burden of their bad ideas onto the general public is nothing new, we’ve just applied it to banking these days as opposed to the widget-making described in history books.  That “stimulus” check is just a glove temporarily put on the fist we usually get, as an addressing of the real issue inherently would introduce a critique of why the government even gives a fuck in the first place — and we can’t have THAT…