Happy thoughts for the weekend:
– How Star Trek: The Next Generation got torture right.
– Dahlia Lithwick on Jeffrey Rosen.
– Gershom Gorenberg on Benny Morris.
– People are driving less.
Have fun. I’m looking forward to Star Trek tonight.
VIDEO: Michael Steele’s First 100 Days
Tomorrow marks Michael Steele’s 100th day as chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). While many members of the GOP were hoping for a dynamic spokesman that could communicate conservative values to the American public, what they ended up getting was a gaffe machine.
Since taking office, Steele has become most known for statements about how the GOP needs to “uptick” its image with “everyone, including one-armed midgets“; how he likes to “wear my hat backwards, you know, because that’s how we roll in the Northeast”; and how he has “slum love” for Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA). ThinkProgress’s Victor Zapanta has put together a video of the highlights. Watch it:
The RNC itself also continues to struggle under Steele’s leadership. In the Daily Beast today, ThinkProgress’s Amanda Terkel writes:
According to the latest FEC reports, the RNC had just over 100 people on its payroll in March compared to more than 200 people on payroll in March 2007 and nearly 260 in March 2005, both off-election years shortly after new chairmen took over. [...]
Steele also has yet to purchase any voter-registration data, which can be key to expanding outreach and field operations. In contrast, when Mehlman took over at the RNC in 2005, he spent nearly $55,000 on voter information in his first two months in office. In 2007, then-Chairman Mike Duncan spent almost $14,000 on such data and files during the same period.
Roll Call also reported yesterday that the RNC is still trying to fill “top spots,” including that of finance director. At least one candidate has turned the job down, and the organization “had to hire a headhunter for a while to look for potential candidates for the job.”
Many Republicans have become discouraged by Steele’s first 100 days and are looking to marginalize him. Although the RNC outpaced the DNC in first-quarter fundraising, a Republican strategist told Terkel, “A lot of donors seem totally underwhelmed by Steele. Some donors are looking for another organization to donate to, and right now, for a lot of them, the [Republican Governors Association] looks like an ideal alternative.” Steele also recently agreed to sign a “secret pact agreeing to controls and restraints on how he spends hundreds of millions of dollars in party funds and contracts,” after media reports leaked about how he is spending precious RNC funds on redecorating his office.
Just remember: Although Steele’s first 100 days may seem like nothing short of a train wreck, there’s supposedly a “logic” behind all this madness. “It’s all strategic.”
Heard it All Before
This is a really excellent article by Manan Ahmed exploring the long tradition of pronouncing Pakistan to be on the bring of collapse. His point is that the American establishment has a marked tendency toward discomfort with any civilian government in Pakistan, leading to a cycle of proclamations of failure followed by coups that does little to solve anything.
Kristol: ‘Literally, On Substance, There Is Now No Argument For Closing Guantanamo’
In recent days, Republicans in Congress, desperate for some political traction, have for some unknown reason latched onto the idea that criticizing the Obama administration for wanting to close Guantanamo Bay is a good one. Last night on Fox News, right-wing super-hawk Bill Kristol came on board.
Kristol criticized Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) argument that detainees should be given “the same due process we give our own troops,” saying it is a political “gift” to Republicans (nevermind the fact that GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham made a similar argument the previous day). “Why not keep Guantanamo open?” Kristol asked, claiming that there is no longer any reason to close it:
KRISTOL: Literally, on substance, there is now no argument for closing Guantanamo. It is entirely symbolic. Obama has shown he symbolically would like to. The Europeans love him. They can’t love him anymore, you know. He should reverse himself.
And the Republican position should now be not just to embarrass the Democrats. Republicans should say it is a ridiculous waste of money, and a little dangerous, incidentally, to now close what has turned out to be an extremely effective, well-run facility.
Watch it:
What Kristol doesn’t understand is that symbolism actually creates substance and the Guantanamo Bay prison serves as a symbol that harms U.S. national security. Indeed, “16 highly-respected intelligence and counterterror officials” told the U.S. Supreme Court last January that holding detainees without due process provides “a powerful recruitment tool for violent extremists…and greater risk to the security of the Nation.” Other experts agree:
– Center for Strategic and International Studies: “In the view of many around the world, Guantanamo represents indefinite detention, torture, and abuse…Guantanamo does serve as a recruitment tool for al Qaeda.”
– Council on Foreign Relations expert Daniel Prieto: Gitmo has “direct effects on our counterterrorism policies, making them brittle and making the United States less safe in the world, in terms of serving as propaganda and an active recruitment tool for terrorists and really inflaming public opinion around the world.”
Even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), whom Kristol fervently supported to become the nation’s next president, has said “Guantanamo has become a symbol around the world that is not good.”
Indeed, as the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss noted, Gitmo “remains a potent symbol of American lawlessness, and a driver of anti-American sentiment” and “raises the political costs for potential American allies and partners.” Addressing Kristol’s claim that Gitmo has been “effective,” Duss notes that it “has been a significant radicalizing force for Islamic militants” and adds, “So yes, it’s been effective — at getting American soldiers killed.”
In Defense of Identity
James Kirchick says he doesn’t like the idea of going out of one’s way to pick a gay or lesbian Supreme Court justice:
I respect Richard’s argument and agree that an openly-gay appointee would do wonders for the visibility of gay people in America. But I want to use the opportunity to make a broader, related point. Namely, that I oppose using a person’s sexual orientation as a job qualification for the same reasons that I oppose the privileging of a candidate based upon their race or sex: It boils individuals down to their immutable traits. The only aspect that Obama should consider as he weighs his options over the next few days is the candidates’ jurisprudence.
This sort of thing sounds incredibly high-minded and commonsensical, but I think it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. For example, everyone knows that a president is going to consider age and health as important criteria in picking his nominees. That’s because a slot on the Supreme Court isn’t a reward for past excellence in jurisprudence, it’s an effort to produce high-quality future jurisprudence. We care about past performance insofar as it’s indicative of future results. We’re not just handing out gold stars, in other words, we’re hoping to produce good Supreme Court decisions. But while of course you’d have to look at a judge’s past work as an important consideration, it’d be crazy to consider it the exclusive source of evidence about future judging. It’s hardly implausible to think that a gay justice may have a different perspective on cases related to gay rights, and I don’t see why it would be illegitimate for a president to take that into consideration.
More broadly, the nature of the Supreme Court is that a great many of its most important cases concern the rights of women and various kinds of minority groups. It’s absurd to think that a forum of nine white, male, heterosexual Christians could possibly compose the best possible forum for deciding these kinds of issues. The reality is that a nine-person group can’t possibly fully represent the diversity—in terms of religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, etc.—that exists in the country at large. But one can do better or worse on this regard and it makes perfect sense to aspire to do better. That’s not an alternative to caring about the quality of the jurisprudence, it’s part of trying to get good jurisprudence.
New Doctors Coalition Adds Voices Of Physicians To Health Care Reform
Our guest blogger is Nikhil Wagle, MD, co-founder of Doctors for America.
As doctors, we see the effects of our broken health system on our patients every single day. We have seen what happens when our patients are denied the care they need, or when they lack access to preventive care, or when they cannot afford their medicines. Doctors know what’s wrong with our health care system — and have ideas about how to fix it. And yet, when it comes to health reform, doctors voices have not been heard.
Doctors for America is working to change that. We are a grassroots organization that seeks to engage physicians in healthcare reform and give them a voice. Our current membership includes over 11,000 physicians from all 50 states, with more and more members every day. Our goal is to convey the ideas and experiences of physicians to achieve healthcare reform based on four key pillars:
1) affordable coverage
2) expanded access to care
3) high quality care
4) practice environments that allow physicians to focus on patient care.
Incorporating the experiences and perspectives of individual physicians is critical to fashioning a solution to our current healthcare crisis. Right now, we’re in the midst of a nationwide campaign to make physicians’ voices heard on health reform: Voices of Physicians. Over the past two weeks, more than 1,000 physicians have added their names to a national map to share their concerns about the healthcare system. As lawmakers put together health reform legislation, it is imperative that they know physicians’ priorities for reform. Voices of Physicians allows physicians from all across the country – the individuals who see our broken healthcare system firsthand each and every day –- to tell Congress and the public what concerns us most about the current healthcare system, and what can be done to allow us to take better care of our patients.
At Doctors for America, we believe that physicians must continue to make our voices heard on critical issues in health reform. Over the next six weeks, we will launch a series of one-week campaigns, each focused on a specific issue of relevance to the health reform effort. The goal will be to educate physicians and the public about these issues and allow the opinions of physicians to be conveyed to Congress and the media. Together, we will continue to build a strong coalition of physicians and patient and professional organizations committed to health care reform.
Ask your doctor how he or she would fix our health care system — and tell them to add their voice to the map. And please visit us at www.drsforamerica.org for more information or to get involved.
Michael Goldfarb’s Strange Complacency About Nazis
I think he may want to think harder about this:
Here’s a clip of Rep. Pete Hoekstra at the presser this morning explaining to a particularly thick reporter why the threat posed by al Qaeda detainees is different, and far more serious, that that posed by German prisoners of war. As Hoekstra explains, the Germans didn’t kill three thousand American civilians as they went to work.
The difference between al-Qaeda and the Nazis is that Nazis didn’t kill civilians? Really?
This is via Conor Friedersdorf.
Meanwhile, the underlying assumption that the United States of America is incapable of building a secure prison physically located on the North American continent is really strange. If there’s anything we know how to do in the USA it’s lock people up. Everybody knows that.
Duke Energy Quits The Right-Wing National Association Of Manufacturers Over Differences On Climate Policy
The National Association of Manufacturers is a right-wing trade organization that refuses to address — or even acknowledge — man-made global warming. Last month, it protested the EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, stating that the “clean air laws” are supposed to only focus on “local pollutants.” It has also funded climate change denier groups and heavily lobbied against any efforts to curb emissions.
The organization’s resistance to change is getting to be too much for its members. Today, Bloomberg reports that Duke Energy Corp., which owns utilities in the Southeast and Midwest, announced that it won’t be renewing its membership with NAM, in part because of NAM’s refusal to address global warming:
“We are not renewing our membership in the NAM because in tough times, we want to invest in associations that are pulling in the same direction we are,” Duke Chief Executive Officer Jim Rogers said last month in an interview. The association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republicans “ought to roll up their sleeves and get to work on a climate bill, but quite frankly, I don’t see them changing.”
Charlotte, North Carolina-based Duke is a founding member of the United States Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of business and environmental groups that seeks to influence legislation on greenhouse gases linked to global warming. The National Association of Manufacturers has opposed mandatory controls, arguing they will harm the economy.
A Duke spokesman also said that the company would like to see cap-and-trade legislation “happen this year if possible.”
Duke isn’t the only corporation that is being frustrated that trade organizations — such as NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — are refusing to address global warming. Some other examples:
– Thirty-two corporations — including Duke, Caterpillar, Xerox, News Corp, Dow Chemical, and PepsiCo — are members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which has called for a cap-and-trade system.
– Businesses such as Johnson & Johnson and Nike have asked the Chamber of Commerce to refrain from publicly opposing cap and trade legislation because the position doesn’t “reflect the full range of views, especially those of Chamber members advocating for congressional action.”
– Last year, a group of companies — including Starbucks, Nike and Sun Microsystems “banded together to urge Congress to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and promote investment in renewable energy.” The partnership, Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy, asked that “polluters be required to pay for the freedom to pollute and wants Congress to stimulate renewable energy development and ‘green’ job growth.”
In response to Duke’s newest announcement, NAM simply told Bloomberg that it has a “balanced policy on climate change.”
The Vulcan Factor
David Itzkoff sits down with Leonard Nimoy:
President Obama has drawn not-infrequent comparisons to the Spock character. Do you see any similarities there?
I’ve met him twice. The first time was a couple years ago, very early on when he had just announced his candidacy. He was in Los Angeles, speaking at a luncheon we were invited to. There was a very small crowd — minuscule compared to the crowd that he gathered later — at a private home in Los Angeles. And we were standing on the back patio, waiting for him. And he came through the house, saw me and immediately put his hand up in the Vulcan gesture. He said, “They told me you were here.” We had a wonderful brief conversation and I said, “It would be logical if you would become president.”
Good anecdote! I, too, have met Obama twice. So basically, I’m Leonard Nimoy.
Steele on judges with ‘empathy’: ‘I’ll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind!’
Last week, when Supreme Court Justice David Souter said that he intended to retire, President Obama said that in naming a replacement, he would not only “seek somebody with a sharp and independent mind and a record of excellence and integrity,” but also someone who has “empathy” for “the daily realities of people’s lives.” Conservatives quickly latched onto Obama’s use of the word “empathy,” lampooning it and claiming it is a “code word” for an “activist judge.” Guest hosting Bill Bennett’s radio show today, RNC chairman Michael Steele derided “crazy nonsense empathetic.” “I’ll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind!” said Steele. Listen here:
Transcript: Read more
