The Crossed Pond

It’s really not that complicated when you get down to it:

Roger Ebert’s new blog post is sort of unhinged. The centerpiece of the post is a call for Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, John McCain and others to all cosign a public statement declaring that Obama Is Not A Muslim. I kind of suspect that if they were to do so, most of the American left would accuse them of bringing up the issue, unprovoked, just to lodge the possibility further into the public consciousness.

All that aside, the post does contain one very bold and intriguing prediction. I repost it here so that you will know, should it come to pass, that Ebert said it first…

The new issue of Vanity Fair mentions in its profile of Sarah Palin, as a casual aside, that Glenn Beck has booked the Dena’ina Center, the largest venue in Anchorage, for the date of September 11, 2010. What do you think that means? It could mean Beck simply wants to hold a rally in the home state of the woman who shared his podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech.

Beck says he chose that date without realizing its significance. But it cannot be a coincidence that he has chosen 9/11. Nor does it take special insight to connect that date with Palin’s many statements about the “Ground Zero Mosque” and the even more pointed “9/11 Mosque.” The association is obvious: “9/11″ feeds into “mosque” feeds into “Muslims” feeds into the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. Beck and Palin speak about “taking back America.” The buried message is that they will take it back from Muslims. This is a heartless misuse of the tragedy of 9/11 and its victims.

If Beck had planned to come to Anchorage on another date, it wouldn’t have excited much notice. But any meeting in Alaska on 9/11 without Palin also present will be anticlimactic. It’s too far to go not to feature her. The symbolic date of 9/11 invests this event with the inescapable possibility that he and Palin plan to announce their Presidential candidacy for 2012.

We post a lot about which animals are gathering on the horizon to feast on the innards of man and try to usurp our natural place on God’s throne. However, not all in the animal kingdom are our enemies.

Man’s Worst Friend, the stripey menace, tried to attack and kill a 9-year-old boy in Kent, Ohio. And they might have succeeded…had Pinky the Boxer dog not stepped in.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer participated in her first reelection debate last night (she gained office when Napolitano resigned to join the Obama administration).

It did not go well.

Here she is in her first introduction to Arizona voters as a candidate. In which she, right off the bat, forgets the entirety of her opening remarks.

Ah, the perils of public speaking.

I’d be inclined to feel bad for her, but she’s kind of a bitch.

I’ve been ambivalent about her reelection race. Now I’m rooting for a loss.

Senator Feinstein to chair the “No on Prop 19″ campaign.

Prop 19 being the proposition to legalize marijuana in the state.

Slate also has a review up of Meghan McCain’s new memoir.

Slate gets an exclusive look at 13 paintings done by prisoners at Gitmo.

Probably a good idea not to read too much into them, but interesting nonetheless.

The hostage taker at Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland is a…militant Malthusian?

Huh.

Detroit had a bad year, so they’re no longer playing meaningful games. So, at roster expansion time, they’ve decided to call up a fair share of perennial minor leaguers in their organization, including the most veteran professional player in the Tigers organization, Quebecois catcher Max St. Pierre, who has spent 14 years – 978 games – in the farm system, without a single big league at bat.

Welcome to The Show.

Think the Republicans, if they regain Congress, are going to begin moving towards a Ryan-style overhaul of our nation’s finances and make sure that we begin doing the things necessary to throw some reigns on our spending and deficits? Well, if so, one of the chief leaders of the charge would be Pat Toomey. Toomey, remember, was the President of the Club for Growth when it came up big, and his chops for austerity, one would expect, would be second to none. Indeed, an unwillingness to engage in real spending restraint is what he largely challenged Specter on in 2004. So if ANYBODY would be unwilling to demagogue on entitlements, you’d think it would be Pat Toomey.

Which is why I was surprised when I saw this ad last night:

Now admittedly, the ad isn’t from the Toomey campaign. It is instead from something called Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies which, lacking a simple “About” page, struck me as an empty shell/funnel 527. Which, indeed it is, as a sister organization to American Crossroads which, if you’ll remember, is the organization that Karl Rove and Ed Gillsepie started for donors disenchanted with the RNC under Michael Steele but still looking to give money to national Republican efforts.

So, this is essentially a major ad buy on behalf of the Toomey campaign by national Republican leadership.

This is part of a larger trend within the GOP to cast themselves as Medicare’s best friend (see here and here and here and here). Seeing it dispatched on behalf of Pat Toomey though is a bad sign. We already know that national security, defense, and foreign policy are off-limits for spending restraint, and taxes are not just off limits full stop but must be reduced, but I think it’s safe to say, increasingly, that the battle over Medicare may well be over. It, too, is apparently not only beyond discussion (the single biggest spending-suck in the budget), but Republicans will try to bite the head off anyone who proposes cuts to it (in this case, the single most significant cost reduction measure in Obamacare and its major peon to fiscal responsibility). Not just guys like John McCain and Lindsay Graham, mind, but guys like Pat freakin’ Toomey. There are still a few who seem willing to have that fight – notably Paul Ryan and Rand Paul – but by and large, entitlement spending increasingly looks off the table. Indeed, the GOP are now running on their allegiance to it.

In some ways, this whole Tea Party insurgency is a great thing for the GOP. But it’s also a one step forward two steps back sort of thing. They can make Pat Toomey a general election frontrunner, but of course once he is, he runs on scaring seniors into thinking Democrats are out to cut them from the government teat.

I remember when the Jose Padilla case first got notice, Adam (who is a Brit) saying something to the effect of “if you had told me ten years ago that in America it would be considered generally politically acceptable to grab an American citizen from an airport and detain them indefinitely without charges, I’d not have believed it.”

I sort of feel the same way about the case of Anwar Awlaki. Awlaki is the American citizen, living in Yemen, whom the Obama administration has more or less aid they plan to kill on sight. The ACLU, among others, are trying to represent them, but found a bit of a Kafkaesque legal boondoggle – apparently, you have to seek from the government a license to then defend an American citizen from being killed by said government. The ACLU found they could not attain such a license in the case of Awlaki, although finally the Treasury Department (the granter of said licenses) caved.

In any event, the ACLU has posted one of the briefs they are filing, on behalf of the father (for obvious reasons, they don’t want to name Awlaki as plaintiff, lest he be compelling to come to court and testify, likely resulting in his, you know, murder). It reads, in part:

The right to life is the most fundamental of all rights protected by the Constitution and by international law. Outside the context of armed conflict, the intentional killing of a civilian without prior judicial process is unlawful except in the narrowest and most extraordinary circumstances.

The United States is not at war with Yemen, or within it. Nonetheless, U.S. government officials have disclosed the government’s intention to kill U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi, who is believed to be located there, without charge, trial, or conviction. . . .

Outside of armed conflict, both the Constitution and international law prohibit the use of lethal force against civilians except as a last resort to prevent concrete, specific, and imminent threats that are likely to cause death or serious physical injury. An extrajudicial killing policy under which individuals are added to “kill lists” after secret bureaucratic processes and remain on the lists even in the absence of any reason to believe that they pose a threat of imminent harm goes far beyond what the Constitution and international law permit.

That the government has kept secret the standards under which it targets U.S. citizens for death independently violates the Constitution: U.S. citizens have a right to know what conduct may subject them to execution at the hands of their own government.

Seriously, read the whole thing, word for word, and marvel that this is the United States of America we are talking about here.

More from the ACLU, if you lack the background:

One enterprising pastor is seeking to raise 8 million dollars for a Christian Center, and it’ll be even closer to Ground Zero than Park51, so nyeh! The pastor in question, Bill Keller, is, unlike those Islamic fucks, an avatar for pluralism and the values that make America great.

To get a sense of where Keller is coming from, consider his project’s website, which calls Islam a religion of “hate and death” whose adherents will go to hell. It also says: “Islam is a wonderful religion… for PEDOPHILES!”

Keller is the same pastor who hosted a birther infomercial that encouraged viewers to send him and a partner donations to advance the birther cause. His Internet ministry explicitly calls President Obama the new Hitler. He calls homosexuality a perversion and abomination. And in 2008, he targeted presidential contender Mitt Romney for being Mormon with a campaign called “voting for Satan.”

In related news, what 911 memorializing has really been missing is a rock musical.

Broadway, btw, is a pathetic 10 blocks from Ground Zero, and the Manhattan LDS church a full 5 miles Get with the program abominations!

So, the Wall Street Journal the other day posted a very nice story on George Mason University’s Peter J. Boettke and highlighting all he’s done to popularize Austrian economics, including creating what is arguably the most libertarian academic department at any university in America. It’s a nice piece and, indeed, Boettke has done a lot, and his program and really GMU as a whole have done wonders for creating a mainstream, normalized respectable hotbed for Austrian economics and libertarian thought at large. It’s also a terrific example of a small commuter school suddenly finding itself vaulted into becoming an important university solely by finding an unrealized niche, a blind spot in higher academia. Others have tried this before, but usually in attacking the whole perceived godlessness/secularness/multiculturalness of higher ed, leading to places like Liberty University et al. George Mason managed to take a different tack, choosing instead to sop up wonderful economists, historians, and political scientists, who are all but unhireable in most major universities for not adhering to a certain degree of groupthink (that tendency in higher ed, btw, is less malicious and consciously dogmatic than imagined, and is instead more a kind of soft, but nevertheless very real, prejudice against conservative thought as being somehow of a lesser order than, say, economic philosophy based on Marxism. They don’t TRY to drive out conservatives—they just find themselves much less impressed with conservative thought than liberal thought, and due to that, the trickle down effect is to drive out conservatives and, more importantly, train grad students to be liberal if they want to get ahead, thus leaving them with a nearly unanimous liberalism in higher academic postings, which just feeds the cycle even more).

I digress.

Anyway, the WSJ article was a nice piece and, as mentioned, GWU does good work, and heck, it’s one of the few pieces speaking positively about Austrian economics in a major publication that I can recall. But owing to their philosophy that praising anything that is not Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, or Ludwig Von Mises, or disbanding the Fed, is a veiled malicious attack on one, some, or all of those things, the good folks at LewRockwell.com have lost their ever-lovin’ minds over this article, leading to the aforementioned pitfight.

You can catch up. In chronological order (also, in ascending order of vitriol): 1, 2, 3, 4. There are actually a few more, but they appear to have been taken down since yesterday.

The Lew Rockwell guys do good work and all, and I still enjoy their blog, but they are also precisely indicative of everything that is wrong with Libertarianism, in particular the need it constantly feels to harangue each other over purity tests.

It’s an already semi-maligned poll, but if anything for being an outlier in favor of Republicans. Nevertheless, it might be worth mentioning that in the most recent Newsweek poll, 52% of Republicans believe it is definitely true or probably true that Obama “sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world”.

What’s weird to me is that this “issue” is entirely cultural. To my knowledge, the only people who would seriously argue this from a policy point of view (Victor David Hansen, say) have to find some pretty obscure actions to do it (say, a random state department missive on being nice to Egyptians, say, or some circuit court ruling somewhere saying that consideration of international law has a place in American jurisprudence). Otherwise, precisely nothing in Obama’s actual policy strikes me as anything but credibly anti-Jihadist. He’s as vicious as Bush in terms of not allowing civil liberties or the constitution to get in the way of torturing him some terror suspects. He’d doubled down in Af-Pak and extended indefinitely our stay in Iraq. He’s as cow-towing to Israel as any President. But 52% of Republicans don’t care. It seems true, to them, apparently, based entirely on an imagined cultural milieu surrounding Obama. Weird.

A new animal to join the ranks of Man’s Enemies.

More from those damn monkeys.

From Jay Rosen:

Victor Navasky, the former publisher of the Nation, likes to say that there’s an ideology of the left, an ideology of the right, and an ideology of the centre. The news system is on guard against too much left or too much right. It is defenceless against any excesses in the ideology of the centre. There you can be as extreme or didactic as you like.

Unfortunately, virtually all foreign policy and national security questions are hashed out in “the centre”.

This is pretty central to my worldview (and my #1 complaint against hardcore liberals), so obviously it’s Conor Friedersdorf expressing the thought here.

In the course of American history, if either liberals or conservatives disappeared entirely from the American scene, leaving the right or left to pursue their best ideas and most flawed excesses alike, this country would be in far worse shape than it is today.

And anyone who thinks that completely vanquishing “the other side” in American politics would produce good results for very long is naive at best.

Ron Paul continues to challenge his fellow atheists in the foxhole.

My least-favorite man-made phenomenon, other than Social Security, is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Essentially, several thousand miles of the north-central Pacific–an area somewhere between the size of Texas and the size of the entire continental US–have become the permanent gathering place for a miasma of non-biodegradable plastic gathered together by ocean currents.

Despite the frequent use of the name “Garbage Island” to describe this festering canker sore on the face of the planet, the area is not technically an island–you couldn’t, for example, stand on it, and there are places within it which are actually indistinguishable from normal seawater to the naked eye. Well, these magnificent bastards want to change that by gathering the crap together and actually building a REAL island out of it. Like, with agriculture and buildings and stuff. On which people would live.

…that we’re still “trying” alleged terrorists before military commissions and using evidence obtained through torture to obtain guilty verdicts. The current showcase: a fifteen-year-old captured in combat, the first child soldier in at least sixty years to face trial, up on charges of murder. The judge has already ruled that evidence obtained through the implicit threat of a gang rape–again, this threat levied by US military interrogators against a fifteen-year-old–is admissable. Oh, and military authorities have attempted to bar journalists from the proceedings for reporting information that was already part of the public record.

All of this, needless to say, with the full endorsement of the current President of the United States.

I know it’s old news and all, but I guess I get an occasional thrill out of poking the corpse of American justice with a stick.

I haven’t blogged at all about the Ken Mehlman story, because who cares, but in reading around I have found cause to finally blogroll a site I’ve actually been reading with some regularity for years – GayPatriot. GayPatriot (Bruce Carroll and Dan Blatt) is roughly to the right of Powerline, and GAY! Doesn’t that just blow your EFFING MIND?!?

But seriously, they’re a site that have been plugging away with good work for a long time, and for their liberal critics, I’d just add that they are doing more, on their lonesome, to see that Republicanism is not mutually exclusive with homosexuality and that the other half of the country is okay with a gay figurehead than any liberal has ever done (or would care to, so invested are they in the liberalism of gays). Anyway, they are more partisan than I normally care for (they are gay Republicans, as opposed to Andrew Sullivan, who is a gay conservative, or A Stitch in Haste’s Kip Esquire, who is a gay libertarian misanthrope (I love you Kip)), but always a good read. Onto the blogroll go they.

Also: adding GayPatriot to the blogroll is pretty much all I’m going to say on the subject of Ken Mehlman.

A new CBS Poll shows that only 19% of Americans are opposed to gays and lesbians serving openly in the United State military. 75% are in favor, including 61% of veterans and active duty servicemembers. For the record, roughly 19% believe that Barack Obama is a muslim and that 911 was an inside job.

This sort of reinforces my inherent belief in the American people. Or rather, my inherent unbelief in Washington partisan politics as an accurate representation of them. I, personally, don’t think gay marriage, for instance, is a big deal to most people. Even those that tell pollsters they’re against it, my guess most would just shrug and go on about their lives if it came to pass – not take to the streets. I think what tends to polarize is the Washington political take on things, and to make issues which are important, yes, suddenly seem like vital tears across the heart of the populace when, in fact, they’re just as likely a collection of half-thoughts and soft knee-jerks that, when pressed against reality, usually either dissipate entirely or just kind of dull to a barely perceptible background throb. This is also why I believe in leadership – an issue may be 60-40 one way, until somebody actively decides to use their platform to show some leadership on the question; meaning, quite often, if you give people an opportunity to move past a prejudice or old political habit, very often they’ll take it.

I named Cee-Lo Green is the Soul Machine the best hip hop album from the 00s (and third best overall), and although Cee-Lo has certainly been visible since that 2004 release, he hasn’t put out another another solo record. So thanks to Chris Bodenner for hipping me that he’s got a new one coming out. Man, this and Sufjan Stevens in the same day, and after The Books and Joanna Newsom already dropped this summer? Hooray!

Anyway, the song is pretty much the greatest thing music has ever produced. Also, totally safe for work.

Cee-Lo Green – Fuck You

(seriously, don’t let the title fool you – what a fantastic song)

Good post from Talking Points Memo on the sheer power that Sarah Palin is beginning to wield in GOP primaries. It is not that she can simply swoop in and declare anybody she likes the winner – her win % is good, but not phenomenal. But likewise, she isn’t just picking winners, and her winning percentage is good despite picking some pretty dark horses. But the key is that her endorsement has shown an enormous power to transform races, in a way almost unique in the recent history of political endorsements (normally a fairly flaccid business). She almost overnight brings in a swoon of national media attention, a sudden powerfully strong brand loyalty that she can practically merely anoint people with, and immediately puts who she doesn’t endorse in an incredibly uncomfortable defensive position that has them not just having to push back against Palin and her brigades but, in a sense, the larger energy and ranks of the grassroots right—never a good thing to suddenly have to do a week before a Republican election.

I have guffawed at claims to Palin’s political importance before, but she really is starting to turn into an enormously interesting and influential figure on the right. And I’m further beholden in my belief that she will, in fact, sit out the 2012 race. Better to be the Queen than the Prime Minister. Why have to get on the record and do hostile interviews and debates and be considered for your governing potential, when instead she can sit out, have the entire political and media landscape hang on her every tweet, and be the most coveted potential endorsement – and most potentially fatal non-endorsement – since…I don’t know when. Can you imagine the level of prostration Romney, Pawlenty, Huckabee, Gingrich, et al will go to to woo her? More to the point, is there any more surefire way to advance her brand, clout, and earning potential—all while entirely and eternally insulating her? In some ways, it would be BETTER if Palin ran in 2012…then people will have to run against her. Not if she sits out and plays the game the way she’s been playing…then they have to run for, and to, her. If you’re a relatively vapid but media savvy egomaniac who who loves the spotlight of politics but hates the pressure of, you know, governing, or knowing anything about policy, which would you choose? I don’t think it’s even close.

Alan “Abe” Simpson, former Senator from Wyoming and now co-chair of President Obama’s deficit commission, for some reason decided to personally respond to a Huffington Post piece about Social Security written by the Executive Director of the National Older Women’s League, whatever that is. In his email reply, Simpson was very generous with the caps and exclamation marks—always a good sign—and closed with this.

“If you have some better suggestions about how to stabilize Social Security instead of just babbling into the vapors, let me know. And yes, I’ve made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know ‘em too. It’s the same with any system in America. We’ve reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!”

For some reason, characterizing Social Security as a milk cow with 310 tits doesn’t go over well with the liberal community. Simpson has since apologized, and the White House says they aren’t going to fire him over it.

The National Organization for Women, however, are not satisfied. Why they are leading the charge against Grandpa Simpson, I’ve no idea—referencing milk cows is, apparently, sexist…because they have tits, you see—but they are nevertheless choosing to take the high road, and…

For those who believe Social Security belongs to the workers who earned it, not to the government and certainly not to the Fiscal Commission, NOW announces its “Tits for an Ass” campaign. NOW will be asking our 500,000 members and supporters to use our website or Twitter account to help us buy baby bottle nipples, which we’ll hand deliver to the White House with a letter urging President Obama to fire Alan Simpson.

Ah.

In any case, nothing like a good cranky quasi-misogynistic cranky Senator v. national feminist organization fight to bring a little joy and tit-jokes to the world on a slow news week (Jim Webb and Emily’s List were, apparently, unavailable). Also, had this just been some guy, I would have thought to myself “man, make that guy the co-chair of Obama’s deficit commission.” Sometimes, dreams do come true.

If you’re wondering what that whole Julian Assange rape-accusation-then-24-hours-later-withdrawn-accusation-then-24-hours-later-”molestation”-charge thing was about, read this.

Like you even need to ask.

A lot could be said of the recent 9th Circuit ruling that found that police sneaking onto a dude’s property and sticking a GPS tracking device on his jeep, without a warrant, was, in fact, legal. But as an interesting sidebar, absent the issue of whether a GPS device on a car requires a warrant, there is the question of whether sneaking onto a dude’s yard to plant on constitutes entering a person’s property. The 9th Circuit argued that no, in this case it did not, because dude didn’t have a fence. Therefore,

The dissenting judge, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, makes a good point as it relates to judicial “diversity”:

The very rich will still be able to protect their privacy with the aid of electric gates, tall fences, security booths, remote cameras, motion sensors and roving patrols, but the vast majority of the 60 million people living in the Ninth Circuit will see their privacy materially diminished by the panel’s ruling…

There’s been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there’s one kind of diversity that doesn’t exist: No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter. Judges, regardless of race, ethnicity or sex, are selected from the class of people who don’t live in trailers or urban ghettos. The everyday problems of people who live in poverty are not close to our hearts and minds because that’s not how we and our friends live. Yet poor people are entitled to privacy, even if they can’t afford all the gadgets of the wealthy for ensuring it.

The Onion is there.

Fictitious sources also confirmed that the so-called “masterminds” behind our country’s security and strategic defense are in fact people of moderate to reasonably above-average intelligence just like us who perform their jobs with more or less the same degree of competence and zeal as any regular person with a job would.

“Obviously, it would be very comforting, and pretty cool, if there were stealth groups of resourceful, naturally gifted secret agents like me scouring the planet, rooting out terrorist sleeper cells, and tracking down Osama bin Laden,” said a multilingual computer/ explosives/espionage expert who most Americans actually believe is a real guy out there. “I’m not denying that would be amazing; my only point is that it just isn’t true.”

“Believe me, I wish I existed, too,” the fake man added. “I would probably be great.”

Often, when I’m arguing with a guy like James, he likes to point out that, for instance, I’m naive to think that America hasn’t tortured people before Bush, and that somewhere, at some point, there was an agent of government torturing somebody long before it became a public controversy. I take the point…to a point.

But I also, in other contexts, like to point out the Myth of the Hypercompetent Government that American Greatness conservatives trade on. The idea that we’ve got Jack Bauer CIA agents who clearly are only torturing the right suspects in moments of incredible dire emergency and know precisely what they’re doing, or the military is filled only with brave, selfless, salt of the earth people staring up and off to the distance slightly as the Iraqi sunset paints their profile, or that the guys that are monitoring out phone calls without a warrant are doing so professionally, expertly, and perfectly collating the data, or that the private contractor mercs working outside the Green Zone in Iraq are tough-as-nails Schwarzeneggers who have seen the real shit and cast a steely eye, protecting us from the dirty job of keeping the world safe. Or that, put simply, the people in charge are somehow of a different caliber than you and I, know what they’re doing, so we should just trust them and assume that someone somewhere knows more than us and is doing their job surely in the most positive possible way we can fantasize them doing it.