Keeping America Safe

Now that we’ve been protected from the diabolical mastermind that is the guy who drove around Osama bin Laden, the Washington Post is reporting that the Defense Department isn’t sure that they’re even going to let the guy go after his sentence is fulfilled. Honestly, if they aren’t planning on letting these guys go, even people like Hamdan who are of little or no importance, what are we planning on doing with them?

What I find truly shocking about the Bush Administration and the abhorrent way they’ve conducted the push back against al Qaeda is not the ugly, illegal way they’ve treated people – we still have people in Guantanamo Bay who are innocent of any crimes – although that’s bad enough – but the impression that they give of not having put any thought at all into what they were going to do down the road.

Seriously, did they just envision keeping these men in a prison until they all died of old age? One reason they don’t want to let them go is the fear that they’ll go back to their old terroristin’ ways. Did we not think about this before we decided to keep these men locked in an extralegal limbo for years and years?

So, my question for you guys. January, 2009, President Obama is sworn in. What does he do with Guantanamo Bay? What does he do with these prisoners? Does he transfer the ones who really were involved in terrorism to federal prisons? What about the innocents that have been rotting away there for years? I really don’t have any idea. But it certainly is something that bears thinking about.

In Case You Needed a Reminder of Why It's Tough to be a Russian Woman

I really don't have words for this article that ran on the HuffPost today, you'll just have to check it out for yourself. Suffice to say:

Line so bad I had to cover my eyes #1: "If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

Line so bad I had to cover my eyes #2: The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

Horrifying statistic of the day:

According to a recent survey, 100 percent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 percent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven percent claimed to have been raped.

100%?...100%! My god. How big was the sample? I guess I'm hoping it's wasn't a very scientific survey, but still...

Special thanks pw and tim, for sending me the link to this story.

Obama Challenges

I was talking to a friend yesterday, and he brought up something I hadn't previously considered. Obviously anyone paying attention to politics is familiar with the primary argument against an Obama presidency -- he's not ready to lead, he doesn't have enough experience, etc.

What my friend mentioned and I found fascinating wasn't that he's not ready, but that he doesn't have the infrastructure around him to effectively accomplish things once he's elected. He argued that the biggest obstacle to his relatively short political career and extremely short amount of time in Washington was that there wasn't a big enough group of "Obama people" that had been cultivated in order to fill positions. In particular, he talked about the staffs of his cabinet members and those in the top layers of the bureaucracy.

The argument goes that you need a bunch of people in a bunch of different positions that are loyal to you, and that you can count on in difficult situations and that Obama hasn't been around long enough to have a high number of people that fit that description.

This wouldn't manifest itself outside the beltway, at least not in an obvious way, but might hinder his ability to accomplish his (probably very sizable) agenda in his first year.

Now, I think it's worth noting that Bush, who's famous for valuing loyalty over competency, and who brought a ton of people up from Texas with him after being elected, has...struggled, but I still think the concept is worth thinking about, and I do think it might be a challenge should he be elected.

Channeling Stuart Smalley

Sorry for my lack of posts in the last day or so. Three more interviews and a couple more networking meetings for me the last two days. Still waiting to find out, but I'm not feeling super hopeful. But, one meeting often begets another, and so on and so on, or so I tell myself. When I'm feeling rough I generally try to stay busy, so expect the frequency of my blog posting to skyrocket, while my quality plummets (assuming you believe they are capable of getting worse). As they say, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Nevertheless, for anyone out there so addicted to the news that the weekend is no impediment, check back and see what's going on.

The Worst of the Worst

Well, thank god we started these extralegal, extrajudicial military tribunals to try the “worst of the worst.”  Because, lord knows, I wouldn’t feel safe at night if I didn’t know that the military was protecting me from guys who know how to drive.  For the next five months, I’ll know that I can get a safe night’s sleep.

The whole Guantánamo Bay fiasco has exemplified the Bush Administration. Executive overreach, absurd claims, insistence that they’re protecting us from the harsh realities that we’re not ready to face, and at the end of it, we’re left with this pitiful, laughable conclusion.  If this man really did anything to deserve thirty years in prison, I’m glad to know that the Bush Administration has screwed it up so thoroughly that a rigged, semi-legal military tribunal couldn’t even convict him of the main charge against him.  The last six years have been like Orwell writing for Monty Python.

Obama and Gates

David Ignatius in the Washington Post discusses a role for Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a potential Obama Administration. Matt Yglesias has what I think of as the definitive take on this talk of Obama keeping Gates on as a move toward bi-partisan reconciliation, saying essentially that keeping on Gates reinforces the notion that Democrats are inherently weak on national security issues. Obviously, this is an idea of recent, post Vietnam coinage, and I think it’s one that an Obama Administration should be anxious to put to bed. However, Ignatius is recommending something else: instead of keeping Gates on at the Pentagon, he recommends putting Gates in charge of a commission to reform the intelligence community (for real, this time).

Why not appoint Gates to head a special commission to revise the basic framework of the National Security Act of 1947? He knows all the pieces of this puzzle -- having run the CIA and worked at the National Security Council earlier in his career.

Certainly, Gates’ predecessor has allowed him to look almost messianic in comparison, and he has been doing a competent job with the post. In particular, his efforts to reform the Air Force seem like an encouraging development. I can certainly see why Obama would want to include Gates in a commission of this sort. But once again, Obama needs to emphasize that it’s not just Republicans who can deal with national security.

Creating a Gates Commission certainly has appeal if you believe bipartisanship to be an unmitigated good. I’m not so sure that that’s so. Good policy and good government simply does not always require that a Republican and a Democrat need to be in the room together at the same time. It certainly can’t hurt, but I don’t think it’s always a good if it continues to reinforce a negative, destructive narrative.

Hip to be Square

I felt like this was too good not to post over here. I was reading Obsidian Wings this morning and publius posted a link to a Wall Street Journal article by Mark W. Davis about a Republican Policy Committee produced CD (and podcast) called Freedom Songs: The American Empowerment Agenda, a CD with spoken word discussions of Republican talking points.

From the Journal article:

I have on my desk a CD sent out this spring from the Republican House Policy Committee. Fat, 1970s lettering bears the title, "Freedom Songs." The cover image of the CD package is a sepia-tone photo of Teddy Roosevelt.

Open it up and you are treated to photos of Warren G. Harding staring into the horn of a crank phonograph, Herbert Hoover listening to a wireless, and a glum-looking Calvin Coolidge simply glowering at a camera. In an accompanying letter, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan writes that the CD includes "riffs by Dr. Russell Kirk," as well as "the pounding rhythm section of the Austrian School of Economics."

Kitsch is best when it’s unintentional. This CD seems to come from the same realm of boneheaded, ham-handed obliviousness as the kind of 1950s hygiene videos they used to mock on MST3K.  But what really interests me about this whole thing is, just how bad can Republican youth outreach become? Does the Republican Policy Committee not have any interns to run this stuff past? The Democratic Party has captured my generation's vote almost by default, without having to try too hard – the Republican Party has just made itself too unlikable to almost anyone under thirty-five who wasn’t homeschooled.   Part of it obviously has to do with the Republican emphasis on culture war politics in the last couple of elections. But, short of kicking out the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party, is there anything they can do to win back the youth vote for this generation?

They could at least put some Ted Nugent songs on there. The kids still like the Motor City Madman, right?

The Smell of Authenticity

Being as I'm originally from Wilmington, Ohio, I felt like I had to link to this post from Steve Benen over at the Carpetbagger Report, which stemmed from an article the Cleveland Plain Dealer did on a recent McCain visit to my hometown.

Wilmington's been in the news a lot lately after it was announced that our biggest employer (by a factor of 10), DHL would be pulling out, and transferring their business over to UPS, costing us some 8,000 jobs. There are about 15,000 people in my hometown, though in fairness people come from all around to work at DHL.

DHL actually bought the biggest company in my hometown, Airborne Express in 2003, as they were trying to expand the air shipping aspect of their business. What McCain apparently forgot to mention while he was courting votes, according to the CPD story, is that his campaign staff, and McCain himself, were pretty involved in the process that allowed DHL (a company based in Germany) to buy Airborne.

I'll be curious how this gets played in my hometown (my parents and most of my family still live there), as it's one of the most reliably Republican counties in the state (electing Bush by a three or four to one margin in 2004). I can't imagine Obama picking up the county, or even the city, but I guess we'll see.

I will say that the massive layoffs caused by DHL's decision, and the despondent tone of news and emails I receive from back home were part of the reason I decided to come to DC and find work in a field where I might have (however small) a role in public policies that effect people's lives. God knows my town could use the help of somebody on the inside in the years to come.

Sullivan's New Contest

Andrew Sullivan has an interesting proposal over on his blog. He’s creating a contest to see who can make the most cynical, manipulative, distorting ad they can post to YouTube. The idea is to make sure that political hatchetmen like Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt don’t have any material left to work with – this way, they’ll have to deal with substantive issues, as all the nastiness is already out in the open.

I can see a couple of problems with this idea. The first is that this kind of contest implies that there is a kind of parity in the types of campaigns that Obama and McCain are running. From what I’ve seen, this simply isn’t true. Obama, in the primary and now in the general, has gone out of his way to be as evenhanded as possible, to try to not attack, and when he does, attack on issues and not on character. Part of this, of course, is the fact that he has to campaign this way. The media would never let him get away with attacks the likes of which McCain has been running.

In fact, part of what’s so appealing (as Sullivan has extensively noted) is that Obama is above (or at least too smart to engage in, not quite the same thing) the kind of campaigning that McCain has been reduced to: comparisons to disgraced pop singers, stunts with tire pressure gauges, flat out lying about Obama’s relations to the troops. This is precisely why so many committed Democrats wanted to see Clinton running against McCain – because she could get down in the mud with him and duke it out.

But despite that, Obama won the primary. He’s run a campaign that has largely avoided the pitfalls that McCain’s hacks are waiting with salivating jaws to spring. The recent gas ad that the Obama campaign ran was an order of magnitude classier than the stuff the McCain camp has run.

The second problem I have with the idea is the implication that when presented with the facts, the American public will make a reasoned, rational decision based on facts and a clearheaded reasoning. I don’t want to be cynical about it, but I don’t think this accurately reflects the way people make these decisions. I think that there’s no way to know what this kind of experiment would do to the campaign, but I’m pretty sure that “improving the tone” is not a likely outcome.

Extinct Blog of the Day

Today's inactive blog features the Green family's "eco blog". I particularly enjoyed their four posts under the "lunar astrology" label. Live the dream Green family.

Chicken and Vacations

So, Tyson chicken agreed to allow Muslim employees to use their paid Labor Day holiday (a day they usually have to work, anyways) and take a paid holiday on Id al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. And, apparently, this is a problem for people. One protestor wrote to the union, “A union in the U.S.A., a country based on Christianity. You call yourselves Americans? Have you forgotten 9/11?”

Ignoring the “the US is a Christian nation” canard, what do we make of this kind of reaction? It seems entirely reasonable to me that we would make adjustments and concessions to a large minority. Or even a small one: if you decide you’re Wiccan and you want to give up your Labor Day so that you can do whatever it is that Wiccans do on holidays, more power to you. The idea of the US as a nation of gruff individualists is obviously a simplistic fantasy (ask Ward and June what they would have thought of Id al-Fitr), so perhaps this kind of reaction is inevitable when a large minority group becomes more prominent in US life. I’m sure that in the 1850s, Irish immigrants would not have gotten St Patrick’s Day off, either (or any day, for that matter, so I guess some progress has been made).

My question is, like with the Irish, do we simply ignore this kind of reaction and allow time to take its natural course? Recent immigrants don’t assimilate – their children do. It’s not asking too much to meet people halfway – if anything, Tyson and the union’s compromise seems like the very height of cultural plurality. So, what can we say to the “Love it or leave it crowd”? I think it’s an interesting and important question, but I don’t have an answer.

Example #832 That Life is in No Way a Meritocracy

Apparently there was a special series of shows on Jeopardy in 2004 (and perhaps after that) called "Power Players" in which the show was filmed in Washington, and the contestants were a bunch of political and media heavyweights. Alex Trebek had this hilarious quote in a USA today story:

Most of the regular Jeopardy contestants have read many books. Most of the power players have written many books. But will it make them better players? We'll see.

Well, I saw, and I can tell you that it most certainly did not. The show I viewed had Anderson "Back to you guys in the Hacienda" Cooper, Maria Bartiromo (you'd know her if you saw her) who's still on TV anchoring a bunch of those CNBC business/stock shows, and Kweisi Mfume who was President of the NAACP at the time.

It was painful. For one thing they dumb down the questions for these guys, like they do in celebrity Jeopardy or the ones where they have kids. Think of it, these people make policy and report meaningful events to the public and they have to make the questions less difficult than normal Jeopardy players.

Only Anderson had a positive amount of money after the first round. Despite the nature of the questions Mfume had only amassed $4000 by final Jeopardy and poor Maria (who was somehow still in the red) had to be given $1000 just so that she'd be able to participate in final jeopardy (talk about adding insult to injury). Just remember that the next time she's giving you stock tips. And, please don't be decieved by Anderson's shellacking of his opponents, or by this hilarious gloating column he penned for CNN, he was far from impressive. Thanks to the miracle of the Interweb you can see the questions and answers here.