The Crossed Pond

Jack Murtha has died, following complications from surgery for gall-bladder issues. As I said last week, I wasn’t a fan of him as a politician but hoped he’d get better.

Jack Murtha, Vietnam veteran, long-time Representative PA-12, Appropriator extraordinaire, RIP.

H/t to the Liberty Papers.

And the first television ad Google has ever aired.

From here.

Dem. Ill. lt. gov. candidate exits race amid furor

Feb 7 08:05 PM US/Eastern
By KAREN HAWKINS
Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) – The Democratic nominee for Illinois lieutenant governor has dropped out of the race less than a week after winning the nomination amid a political uproar about his past.

Scott Lee Cohen announced his decision Sunday night at a Chicago bar.

The pawn broker and owner of a cleaning supplies company won the nomination Tuesday. Since then, it has become widely know that he was accused of abusing his ex-wife and holding a knife to the throat of an ex-girlfriend.

The girlfriend herself had been charged with prostitution. He also admits using steroids in the past.

Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, who would have been paired with Cohen on the November ticket, U.S. Rep. Danny Davis and Sen. Dick Durbin all had urged Cohen to leave the race.

Man, that steroids thing. What the hell was he thinking? Christ!

A very promising sign from the national Tea Party Convention, as the chief media champion of birtherism is called out by Andrew Breitbart and by a broad array of conservative bloggers.

One of the long-standing problems of the Ron Paul movement was the aggressive eagerness of a broad array of crackpots to hijack the conversation in pursuit of their agenda. The adoption of the tea party tactic by mainstream conservatism has seemed at times to pose the same danger; however, we are increasingly seeing a willingness on the party of movement regulars to filter out some of the dumber memes.

It is particularly pleasant to see this particular argument so decisively rejected given that some media commentators and even occasional polls have suggested that birtherism was becoming mainstream among conservatives. Apparently not.

WASHINGTON – ”In a landmark decision that overturned decades of legal precedent, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday to remove all restrictions that had previously barred corporations from holding public office. “This is an unfair, ill-advised, and tragic mistake,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said before boarding a flight to Arizona in response to primary poll numbers that show him trailing the Phoenix-based company PetSmart by a double-digit margin. “Despite the deep discounts and exciting promotions that they may be able to offer, these huge, soulless entities are not capable of truly serving the American people’s—or their pet’s—needs.” Corporate attack ads have already begun to hit the airwaves in New York, where a new Pepsi commercial set to a catchy modern remix of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” blasts incumbent governor David Paterson as “unrefreshing” and urges New Yorkers to “taste the choice of a new generation this Nov. 2.

Via the Onion with a tip of my hat to Kip.

Or, the return of the housing bubble.

TARP’s motto used to be “nothing succeeds like failure.” Now it seems nothing fails like success.

Says the Obama White House.

Despite the popularity of Obama’s appearance at the Republican retreat last week, and a blogger call to instantiate it as a new regular feature of White House communications, the White House says no. They do have a point. One imagines that what was neat about it on Friday—not really an open exchange of ideas, but at least in the same genus as one—would be quickly sucked out the moment planning was involved and we’d be left with a sort of combination of the Presidential Debates and the State of the Union, namely, a platitude-fest that just happens to have a Q & A format.

It’s Paul Ryan’s, it’s before the House, and it doesn’t just bend the cost curve. According to the CBO, it eliminates the long term entitlement deficit entirely.

Haven’t plumbed the mechanics of it sufficiently to form a coherent opinion. But it’s damn sure worth a look.

Now that Bayh suddenly looks weak, the GOP primary field is getting crowded. Today, former Senator Dan Coats announced his entry into the race.

Since we’ve been talking about it over here, it seemed like a good idea to read the actual policy in question.  I’m not sure where the name Don’t Ask Don’t Tell comes from, because this reads more like Thou Shalt Not Act Like a Homosexual, or more formally, ”demonstrate(s) a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts”. 

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Jenny Sanford tells Barbara Walters that her first red flag about her husband, Mark Sanford, was when, prior to their wedding, he insisted that the fidelity clause be excised from their wedding vows.

Y’think?

Rehashing a little bit an argument I had with Thimbles, wherein the main criticism of Citizens United is the idea that liberals find it insane that we could conceive of corporations as people. Anyway, came across this quote at Reason which makes my point—that corporations should be thought of more as associations than monolithic entities. Emphasis mine.

This line of attack demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the freedoms protected by the Constitution, which is exemplified by the facile charge that “corporations aren’t human beings.”

Well of course they aren’t — but that’s constitutionally irrelevant: Corporations aren’t “real people” in the sense that the Constitution’s protection of sexual privacy or prohibition on slavery make no sense in this context, but that doesn’t mean that corporate entities also lack, say, Fourth Amendment rights. Or would the “no rights for corporations” crowd be okay with the police storming their employers’ offices and carting off their (employer-owned) computers for no particular reason? — or to chill criticism of some government policy.

Or how about Fifth Amendment rights? Can the mayor of New York exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there?

So corporations have to have some constitutional rights or nobody would form them in the first place. The reason they have these rights isn’t because they’re “legal” persons, however — though much of the doctrine builds on that technical point — but instead because corporations are merely one of the ways in which rights-bearing individuals associate to better engage in a whole host of constitutionally protected activity.

That is, the Constitution protects these groups of rights-bearing individuals. The proposition that only human beings, standing alone, with no group affiliation whatsoever, are entitled to First Amendment protection — that “real people” lose some of their rights when they join together in groups of two or ten or fifty or 100,000 — is legally baseless and has no grounding in the Constitution.

Former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, in addition to being possessed in later life of perhaps the most fearsome eyebrows in British politics, once claimed that he would “squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak”*.

Well, thanks to Obama’s plans to freeze overall discretionary spending, Congressional pips are squeaking. One would expect, of course, objections from the “borrow, tax and spend” blancmangey bulk of spendthrift whores that makes up most of Congress — if they can’t spend our money in their eternal quest to get re-elected so they can spend more of our money, what would they have to do with their time — but some of the alleged fiscal hawks are squeaking, too.

Now, we can leave aside the debate over whether freezing spending while the economy is vulnerable is a good idea — I’m personally not convinced that it is — and also ignore the fact that it’s not discretionary spending that is the problem and just enjoy some of the piffle reported on in that article. To pick one from each side (and clearly politico’s writer is finding this all rather amusing):

Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a conservative Democrat who often takes on Big Government, is criticizing the Obama administration for proposing to end tax breaks for big oil and gas companies in her home state — even though the White House estimates it could save $36.5 billion over 10 years by doing so.

“I’m against that completely,” Landrieu said Tuesday.

O rly?

(Kit) Bond — a Republican who has been merciless in his criticism of deficits under Obama — says the administration should spare the C-17 and instead target the F-35, a “total waste” of a Stealth fighter that just happens to be built outside his home state.

As I say, we can to some extent leave aside the question of whether overall spending should be frozen and let us instead just consider the specificity of the whines. There’s no way we can expect any remotely objective evaluation of the relative worth of one aircraft over another, or one industrial tax break over another, from the elected representatives from districts into which the money would flow if one decision were made and not if another decision were made.

Obviously, when governments are elected and governments spend our money, there’s bound to be preference and subjectivity in the decision-making process, but this stuff is so parochial that even if it weren’t being used to purchase re-election on our dime, it would be suspect. Witness the EADS refuelling plane contract farrago (which is, uneblievably, still ongoing, whilst accusations of somewhat extraordinary favouritism are made); regardless of the essential damage to the democratic process that results from using the collected taxes of the nation (and the deferred taxes that constitute the borrowing) to purchase votes, the process doesn’t even produce good results. The Air Force still doesn’t have a tanker or a godamned contract to get one, over a decade after this nonsense started.

There’s only a blurry line between perfidious thieving hackery and representing one’s constituency but in many of these cases, the line’s not blurry enough to excuse what actually happens.

*Interestingly, that article details the wild flailings of a later Labour government into “bleed the rich” comparable to that of the government for which Healy worked. One can only hope that the current crop suffer the same, prolonged, electoral disaster that affected Healy’s lot.

a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean.

Can this possibly be true?

One of my favourite love-to-hate congressmen, Jack Murtha, is seriously ill. I’m not a fan but I wish him the best.

Sorry, the 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2009. I don’t know anything about BuffaloBeast except this annual list, which is always a winner.

Anyway, the entry for Teabaggers (#35) is an “ouch”.

The Lolcats of protest sign grammar, they think scare quotes actually make things scary (e.g. ‘Obama is a “communist”’). They don’t understand that they’re duped showpieces for billionaires who threaten their freedom and prosperity far more than their beloved nemesis, Big Gubmint. And their instant escalation from complacent couch potatoes to rhetorical revolutionaries just happened to coincide with the election of a black Democrat with the middle name Hussein. What are the chances?

Also good:

32. Geese

Charges: Get the fuck out of the way!

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ statement to the Armed Services committee.

His statement is more dispassionate and, if anything, a little detached, but perhaps appropriately so. He simply began with “The Commander in Chief is making this call, and I fully support both him and it. Therefore, we shall begin the process of repeal in the following ways…”

I don’t have the official statement Admiral and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, but here is a good summation of it. He went much farther than Gates, arguing explicitly that he believed DADT was immoral and, worse, harmed the integrity of the United States military and those in it. There were a few hedges that opponents can latch on to—on timing and the like—but it was still an above-and-beyond sort of statement.

John McCain was the main voice of the opposition at the hearings. Be interesting to hear that conversation around the dinner table with Meghan and Cindy.

Let it be said again that Dailykos is an abjectly partisan organization, but the polls it commissions from Research 2000 are on the level. One can argue for an inclusion bias—that is, the mere fact of asking a question biases respondents, which can be mitigated (or exacerbated) by wording—or identification bias—it might be that when somebody identifies as a Republican, they are really Republican, whereas moderates or people like me might identify as something else, though getting a sort of self-selected sample of the real hardcore. But the methodology is sound and the poll is as scientific as any out there. The results, in other words, are valid.

For awhile Kos has been including weird questions in his polls the intent of which is to gauge (or “prove”) that Republicans are nuts. So, in Texas, he included a question about whether Texas Republicans want to secede from the United States, and found a surprisingly robust number who thought just that. Or, in South Carolina, that “Barack Obama was born in the United States” was actually the minority opinion among the GOP (a result that PPP found so jarring that they decided to poll the question as well to verify the veracity of the R2000 poll—and to their shock found the same result, if anything to an even more significant degree).

Well, Dailykos/Research 2000 have now done away with just throwing a question or two into an otherwise regular poll, and have instead just decided to find 2000 Republicans and throw a bunch of crazy shiat at them to see what the think.

The full poll has not yet been released, but the preliminary results aren’t pretty.

• 39% of Republicans want President Obama to be impeached.

• 63% think Obama is a socialist.

• Only 42% believe Obama was born in the United States.

• 21% think ACORN stole the 2008 election — that is, that Obama didn’t actually win it, and isn’t legitimately the president, with 55% saying they are “not sure.”

• 53% think Sarah Palin is more qualified than Obama to be president.

• 23% want to secede from the United States.

• 73% think gay people should not be allowed to teach in public schools.

• 31% want contraception to be outlawed.

Now, one by one.

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A great infographic from the New York Times detailing Obama’s budget.

Tax time is coming up, and via Infidel, comes a very simple exercise for Tea Partiers or what have you from Slacktivist to determine where your* anger should appropriately be placed.

1. Get out your pay stub.

2. Notice that your net pay is lower than your gross pay. This is because some of your wages are withheld every pay period.

3. Notice that only some of this money that was withheld went to pay taxes. (I know, I know — yeearrrgh! me hates taxes! — but just try to stick with me for just a second here.)

4. Notice that some of the money that was withheld didn’t go to taxes, but to your health insurance company.

5. Now go get a pay stub from last year around this time, from January of 2009.

6. Notice that the amount of your pay withheld for taxes in your current paycheck is less than the amount that was withheld a year ago.

That’s because of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan, which included more than $200 billion in tax cuts, including the one you’re holding right there in your hand, the tax cut that’s now staring you in the face. Republicans all voted against that tax cut. And then they told you to get angry about the stimulus plan. They didn’t explain, however, why you were supposed to get angry about getting a tax cut. Why would you be? Wouldn’t it make more sense to get angry at the people who voted against that Obama tax cut?

But taxes aren’t the really important thing here. The really important thing starts with the next point.

7. Notice that the amount of your pay withheld to pay for your health insurance is more than it was last year.

8. Notice that the amount of your pay withheld to pay for your health insurance is a lot more than it was last year.

I won’t ask you to dig up old paychecks from 2008 and 2007, but this has been going on for a long time. Every year, the amount of your paycheck withheld to pay for your health insurance goes up. A lot.

9. Notice the one figure there on your two pay stubs that hasn’t changed: Your wage. The raise you didn’t get this year went to pay for that big increase in the cost of your health insurance.

So, try it.

*Assuming you aren’t in a high-end tax bracket

I know that Rojas and Brad love “What’s the matter with Kansas” type talk, so when I read this on the weekend I just knew they’d love this story.

Marvel at the horrendous picture of the right wing loonies. Thrill to the hidden assertion that people should vote for their own short-term financial interests. Laugh uproariously at the idea that non-wealthy Republican voters must be having their rational facilities deceived. Enjoy the implicit claim that the Democrats are the party for the poor.

The piece contains some sensible advice about how Democrats should present their case, but it’s advice the author might have considered themselves.

It’s bad enough having bees scheming to take away our world and all we hold dear, but using them as contract muscle to resolve disputes between children?

An Indonesian schoolboy who was facing “serious abuse” charges for causing a bee to sting a classmate has been cleared by a court, reports say.

The boy, believed to be about nine years old, had allegedly placed the bee on a girl’s face where it stung her.

Her parents reported him to the police who arrested him. He faced up to three years in prison.

Lock up the diminutive species traitor and throw away the keys, I say.

William Saletan is still the smartest commentator on abortion around. There’s a lot being said of the Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad, in which his mother Pam tells the story of not aborting her Heisman-Trophy-winning son and look how great the turned out. Which is a fair point, I think, but then, so is Saletan’s:

Pam’s story certainly is moving. But as a guide to making abortion decisions, it’s misleading. Doctors are right to worry about continuing pregnancies like hers. Placental abruption has killed thousands of women and fetuses. No doubt some of these women trusted in God and said no to abortion, as she did. But they didn’t end up with Heisman-winning sons. They ended up dead.

Being dead is just the first problem with dying in pregnancy. Another problem is that the fetus you were trying to save dies with you. A third problem is that your existing kids lose their mother. A fourth problem is that if you had aborted the pregnancy, you might have gotten pregnant again and brought a new baby into the world, but now you can’t. And now the Tebows have exposed a fifth problem: You can’t make a TV ad.

On Sunday, we won’t see all the women who chose life and found death. We’ll just see the Tebows, because they’re alive and happy to talk about it. In the business world, this is known as survivor bias: Failed mutual funds disappear, leaving behind the successful ones, which creates the illusion that mutual funds tend to beat market averages. In the Tebows’ case, the survivor bias is literal. If you’re diagnosed with placental abruption, you have the right to choose life. But don’t be so sure that life is what you’ll get.[...]

Pam made a brave choice, and she has raised a fine son. Celebrate his life. But celebrate her luck, too—and say a prayer for all the women and babies who didn’t make the cut.

Not that that point will win many converts. I think one of the fundamental disconnects along the abortion divide is how utility is treated. Stem cell research is a great example. That, say, embryonic stem cells are from fetuses that, almost certainly, were going to be aborted regardless, and that using their already-aborted tissue could result in a net plus of lives saved, is both a fundamental point of utility the logic is which is more or less irrefutable, and totally besides the point, at the same time. Same here. as Saletan notes, if everybody followed Pam Tebow’s advice, chances are you’d have a net loss of life relative to had they not. But, again, besides the point.

Sarah Palin has come out in support of Rand Paul in the GOP primary for Kentucky Senate. His opponent’s campaign manager isn’t very impressed and is also a bit of a meanie:

Nate Hodson called the Paul campaign’s announcement “a release by a campaign that has demonstrated previously the ability to report things that are not true or half-truths.” Asked if the Grayson camp believed Paul was fabricating support for its candidate, Hodson replied: “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

If it’s true, he’s going to own the market in “activist crazy”.

Arlen Specter has a senior moment and gets confused at an event, walks up on stage as Joe Sestak is giving his closing remarks, is told to get off the stage by the M.C.

Awkwardarity ensues.

Money quote: “Senator, will you please get off the stage?” Ballsy M.C.

For some mysterious reason, I read the CNN website fairly often. I genuinely have no idea why, although as a boy I was often guilty of picking scabs before they were properly healed, so it may be that I continue to practice self-harm in a less physical manner through the electronic media.

Enough of these aimless musings. What caught my attention today was an article purportedly about the age of passenger aeroplanes and how this is sometimes reflect in wear-and-tear to the plane’s interior. Actually reading the article, however, reveals it to apparently be an excuse to say nice things about the Boeing Dreamliner, which as most of will know is a new Boeing passenger aeroplane on which, to some extent, the hopes for Boeing’s passenger aeroplane production are pinned.

For example:

Few people expect luxury while flying, but these days, even the basics seem to be in bad shape.

It’s not uncommon to find your tray table broken, the in-flight entertainment system not working and your seat cushion worn — all of which can make you think, how old is this plane anyway?

All is well so far, you might thing. However, it is immediately followed by this:

It won’t be an issue for passengers who board the shiny new Boeing 787 Dreamliner when it enters commercial service — perhaps sometime next year if everything goes smoothly during its testing period.

Or, you know, any new plane. And don’t forget:

The fuel-efficient aircraft will boast all-new interiors with state-of-the-art lighting, bigger windows, roomier overhead bins, higher humidity levels in the passenger cabin and “more personal space,” according to Boeing.

Read the whole thing. You can also watch a video of the Dreamliner’s maiden flight and learn how many Dreamliners various US-based airlines have ordered.

I can only assume they do this because they have data to suggest that no one’s reading. Other than me.

Here is the event today the reactions to which is currently blazing around the blogosphere (check below the fold for some). There is a lot of, frankly, gushing praise coming out right now about Obama’s address to the House Republican retreat in Baltimore that was just featured on CSPAN. The Republican Party invited him there, and he spoke extemporaneously and then took questions from sitting Republican members of Congress. At the last minute, it was apparently President Obama’s people that requested CSPAN coverage (so says MSNBC).

More please.

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Tony Blair got grilled in an investigation over how the UK got so wound up in the Iraq War.

Round up. Glenn Greenwald’s take.

Leon Panetta announced today that foreign language proficiency is now required for promotion to seniority in the agency.