Hello!
The comments on this profile are unclaimed and thus are unverified.
Do they belong to you? Claim these comments.
hardheaded liberal
Is this you? Claim Profile »
3 months ago
in What Would the Obama Administration Want to Make Vets Buy Private Insurance for Their Health Care? on The Washington Independent
It is a way to shift some of the staggering cost of universal health care away from the government, so that the public price tag for increased financing can be trimmed down - as a marketing strategy. It's only being considered, I suspect, because Obama is fixated on keeping private health insurers in the business of underwriting policies.
If Obama would wise up and go simple, with single-payer, then these complicated ploys would not be necessary. In fact, if he keeps running into Congressional opposition on these strange strategies, he may finally get the message that he needs to bite the bullet and go for broke on the streamlined strategy: single-payer for all.
If Obama would wise up and go simple, with single-payer, then these complicated ploys would not be necessary. In fact, if he keeps running into Congressional opposition on these strange strategies, he may finally get the message that he needs to bite the bullet and go for broke on the streamlined strategy: single-payer for all.
8 months ago
in The National Security Dangers of Demagogery on The Washington Independent
Dear I. Mind,
When I was growing up in South Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s, the type of right-wing paranoia being spewed today by Robin Hayes (R-NC) and Michelle Bachman (R-MN) was limited to Southern Congressmen (all men in those days) and scattered wing-nut Republican Congressmen from places like Orange County (CA), hotbed of John Birch Society activity. Most other folks who spewed this stuff were viewed, as the Birch Society was generally viewed, as looney-tunes. The two-party system did not create the idiocy that Spencer is discussing in this post. In fact, as long as the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, the general tone of personal relations between Congressmen on opposite sides of the aisle was cordial, not destructive.
The destructive partisan rhetoric did not arrive until Newt Gingrich manipulated the media to help him take down Jim Wright, Speaker of the House in the late 1980s. The tactic of partisan destruction worked so well with Wright that Newt continued to use it right through the Radical Right takeover of the Republican Party and of Congress. Since 1994, when the Gingrich Republicans seized control of the House of Representatives, until today, the mainstream media has been treating these idiots as legitimate participants in political discourse. But the Radical Right's "firewall" in the MSM seems to have finally collapsed under the sheer weight of the lies and slimy innuendos put out by Sara Palin and John McCain and their official campaigns. We can only hope that the MSM will keep its head clear after the election and return to applying reality-based standards to media reporting on the idiocy of the current Republican leadership.
The two-party system has existed in the U.S. for most of our history. The only time it came truly unglued was in the three decades between the demise of the original Federalist Party at the hands of Andrew Jackson in 1828 and the ascendancy of Lincoln's Republican Party when he was re-elected in 1864. At other times third parties have made a major push for a share of power (e.g., Populist Party in 1892 got 22 Electoral Votes) but their voters were absorbed the following Presidential election into one of the two major parties.
Multi-party parliamentary systems are also not immune from the extremist tirades that are at issue here. Wherever a party with extremist views commands a substantial following, we see the same type of garbage in public discourse. The current neo-Nazi party in Austria, for example, or the La Pen party in France, or any of the European national parties that have made "anti-immigrants" a major theme of their campaigns in recent years produce the same type of extreme criticism of the other paries - and often receive as good as they give from other political leaders.
In other words, the problem is not the number of parties, it is the existence of a party with truly extremist views that has enough popular support among voters either to rule, or to at least make a huge nuisance of itself in political dialogues.
Incidentally, the Electoral College is a major reason that the two-party system has been so stable in the United States. No third party has been able to get support concentrated in sufficient measure to win the electoral votes of states across regions. The third parties that have won Electoral Votes since 1864 have all been regional parties (Populists in 1892 in the Plains and Mountains, Southern Democrats in 1948 in the segregated South, George Wallace's American Independent Party in 1968 in the Deep South). In 1948 for example, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party polled just 18,000 fewer votes nationally than did Strom Thurmond's Southern Democrats, but Thurmond won 39 Electoral Votes in four states and Wallace won zero electoral votes.
Today many scholars and some pundits are calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and replacing it with national direct election of the President based on the national popular vote. If this ever occurs, there will be a little more possibility for third party candidates to become competitive. Until Obama's success with internet fund-raising can be "bottled" and utilized by third party candidates, though, the cost of entry into modern campaigns will probably limit modern third-party candidates to self-financing billionaires like Ross Perot (1992 and 1996) or Michael Bloomberg (who apparently considered making a third-party effort this year).
When I was growing up in South Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s, the type of right-wing paranoia being spewed today by Robin Hayes (R-NC) and Michelle Bachman (R-MN) was limited to Southern Congressmen (all men in those days) and scattered wing-nut Republican Congressmen from places like Orange County (CA), hotbed of John Birch Society activity. Most other folks who spewed this stuff were viewed, as the Birch Society was generally viewed, as looney-tunes. The two-party system did not create the idiocy that Spencer is discussing in this post. In fact, as long as the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, the general tone of personal relations between Congressmen on opposite sides of the aisle was cordial, not destructive.
The destructive partisan rhetoric did not arrive until Newt Gingrich manipulated the media to help him take down Jim Wright, Speaker of the House in the late 1980s. The tactic of partisan destruction worked so well with Wright that Newt continued to use it right through the Radical Right takeover of the Republican Party and of Congress. Since 1994, when the Gingrich Republicans seized control of the House of Representatives, until today, the mainstream media has been treating these idiots as legitimate participants in political discourse. But the Radical Right's "firewall" in the MSM seems to have finally collapsed under the sheer weight of the lies and slimy innuendos put out by Sara Palin and John McCain and their official campaigns. We can only hope that the MSM will keep its head clear after the election and return to applying reality-based standards to media reporting on the idiocy of the current Republican leadership.
The two-party system has existed in the U.S. for most of our history. The only time it came truly unglued was in the three decades between the demise of the original Federalist Party at the hands of Andrew Jackson in 1828 and the ascendancy of Lincoln's Republican Party when he was re-elected in 1864. At other times third parties have made a major push for a share of power (e.g., Populist Party in 1892 got 22 Electoral Votes) but their voters were absorbed the following Presidential election into one of the two major parties.
Multi-party parliamentary systems are also not immune from the extremist tirades that are at issue here. Wherever a party with extremist views commands a substantial following, we see the same type of garbage in public discourse. The current neo-Nazi party in Austria, for example, or the La Pen party in France, or any of the European national parties that have made "anti-immigrants" a major theme of their campaigns in recent years produce the same type of extreme criticism of the other paries - and often receive as good as they give from other political leaders.
In other words, the problem is not the number of parties, it is the existence of a party with truly extremist views that has enough popular support among voters either to rule, or to at least make a huge nuisance of itself in political dialogues.
Incidentally, the Electoral College is a major reason that the two-party system has been so stable in the United States. No third party has been able to get support concentrated in sufficient measure to win the electoral votes of states across regions. The third parties that have won Electoral Votes since 1864 have all been regional parties (Populists in 1892 in the Plains and Mountains, Southern Democrats in 1948 in the segregated South, George Wallace's American Independent Party in 1968 in the Deep South). In 1948 for example, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party polled just 18,000 fewer votes nationally than did Strom Thurmond's Southern Democrats, but Thurmond won 39 Electoral Votes in four states and Wallace won zero electoral votes.
Today many scholars and some pundits are calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and replacing it with national direct election of the President based on the national popular vote. If this ever occurs, there will be a little more possibility for third party candidates to become competitive. Until Obama's success with internet fund-raising can be "bottled" and utilized by third party candidates, though, the cost of entry into modern campaigns will probably limit modern third-party candidates to self-financing billionaires like Ross Perot (1992 and 1996) or Michael Bloomberg (who apparently considered making a third-party effort this year).
8 months ago
in waterboarding on The Washington Independent
This analysis shows clearly that UC Berkeley should revoke Yoo's tenure as a professor in the Law School (known as Boalt Hall), and that Yoo should be disbarred by every jurisdiction in which he has been admitted to the practice of law.
Yoo was recruited to the Office of Legal Counsel ostensibly because of his academic writings in support of wide-ranging unreviewable powers of the President in "time of [undeclared] war." I attended a lecture by Yoo at the Charleston (S.C.) School of Law some time in the last year. The lecture laid out Yoo's theory of expansive nature of Presidential powers, based largely on executive acts by presidents who knew that those acts were highly questionable under the U.S. Constitution. These acts included FDR's unlawful wiretaps in violation of the 1934 laws against wiretapping and Lincoln's unilateral executive actions at the beginning of hostilities in the Civil War when Congress was not in session, such as his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. FDR of course never even disclosed, much less tried to justify the wiretapping prohibited by statute as an exercise of his constitutional powers, he simply concealed the existence of the taps. Lincoln was a scrupulous defender of the Constitution, and as soon as Congress convened Lincoln sought and obtained Congressional endorsement of his emergency measures.
Yoo graduated Magnum Cum Laude from Harvard with a major in U.S. History. Whatever history he learned, however, his professors apparently did not require that he demonstrate any capacity for critical analysis or critical thought. Apparently the same was true of the faculty at Boalt Hall, which seems to have granted Yoo tenure based on "scholarly" analyses that rested on his arguments from historical examples that truly provided no support whatsoever for the radically anti-constitutional conclusions he drew from those examples.
I spoke with Yoo briefly after the lecture in Charleston, and he appeared to be a mediocre academic with virtually no force of personality. It is easy to see how David Addington, counsel to Cheney, could have imposed his own conclusions on Yoo's academic framework, without Yoo ever pausing an instant to question whether his own tenuous academic theories could be stretched far enough to justify calling the Geneva Conventions "quaint." [My contact with Yoo was brief, but my money is on Addington as the author of the idea that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" in any respect - such dismissive language to describe a long-standing International Treaty is not normally part of an intelligent academic's vocabulary, but a bully like Addington uses dismissive language routinely to undermine the confidence of anyone who is trying to uphold a law that gets in Addington's way.]
As Scott Horton has argued persuasively, Yoo and Addington may well be guilty of war crimes under the standards applied in the Judges Case in the Nuremberg trials. To the extent that Cheney knew how badly Addington and Yoo were mangling the applicable law, he also could be guilty of war crimes under similar analysis.
Sunnstein appears to have accepted for a long time that neo-con academics should be considered wo/men of good faith to be treated as colleagues. The extent to which legal academic writing has been corrupted by the bad faith outcome-oriented screeds of members of the Federalist Society is so extreme that the universe of academic legal discourse now countenances defenses of legal atrocities that have been universally condemned for centuries. (Remember, "the water treatment" was one of the torture techniques that was used on converted Jews and heretics by the Spanish Inquisition. This barbarity has a much longer pedigree as a tool of unscrupulous interrogators than just the last sixty or 120 years.)
Yoo was recruited to the Office of Legal Counsel ostensibly because of his academic writings in support of wide-ranging unreviewable powers of the President in "time of [undeclared] war." I attended a lecture by Yoo at the Charleston (S.C.) School of Law some time in the last year. The lecture laid out Yoo's theory of expansive nature of Presidential powers, based largely on executive acts by presidents who knew that those acts were highly questionable under the U.S. Constitution. These acts included FDR's unlawful wiretaps in violation of the 1934 laws against wiretapping and Lincoln's unilateral executive actions at the beginning of hostilities in the Civil War when Congress was not in session, such as his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. FDR of course never even disclosed, much less tried to justify the wiretapping prohibited by statute as an exercise of his constitutional powers, he simply concealed the existence of the taps. Lincoln was a scrupulous defender of the Constitution, and as soon as Congress convened Lincoln sought and obtained Congressional endorsement of his emergency measures.
Yoo graduated Magnum Cum Laude from Harvard with a major in U.S. History. Whatever history he learned, however, his professors apparently did not require that he demonstrate any capacity for critical analysis or critical thought. Apparently the same was true of the faculty at Boalt Hall, which seems to have granted Yoo tenure based on "scholarly" analyses that rested on his arguments from historical examples that truly provided no support whatsoever for the radically anti-constitutional conclusions he drew from those examples.
I spoke with Yoo briefly after the lecture in Charleston, and he appeared to be a mediocre academic with virtually no force of personality. It is easy to see how David Addington, counsel to Cheney, could have imposed his own conclusions on Yoo's academic framework, without Yoo ever pausing an instant to question whether his own tenuous academic theories could be stretched far enough to justify calling the Geneva Conventions "quaint." [My contact with Yoo was brief, but my money is on Addington as the author of the idea that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" in any respect - such dismissive language to describe a long-standing International Treaty is not normally part of an intelligent academic's vocabulary, but a bully like Addington uses dismissive language routinely to undermine the confidence of anyone who is trying to uphold a law that gets in Addington's way.]
As Scott Horton has argued persuasively, Yoo and Addington may well be guilty of war crimes under the standards applied in the Judges Case in the Nuremberg trials. To the extent that Cheney knew how badly Addington and Yoo were mangling the applicable law, he also could be guilty of war crimes under similar analysis.
Sunnstein appears to have accepted for a long time that neo-con academics should be considered wo/men of good faith to be treated as colleagues. The extent to which legal academic writing has been corrupted by the bad faith outcome-oriented screeds of members of the Federalist Society is so extreme that the universe of academic legal discourse now countenances defenses of legal atrocities that have been universally condemned for centuries. (Remember, "the water treatment" was one of the torture techniques that was used on converted Jews and heretics by the Spanish Inquisition. This barbarity has a much longer pedigree as a tool of unscrupulous interrogators than just the last sixty or 120 years.)
8 months ago
in Bradley Effect on The Washington Independent
Excellent piece of analysis! Thanks to the author, to Spencer, and the rest of the Independent publishing operation for providing such solid reality-based analysis to the wider progressive community!
That said, until a similar analysis shows analogous data for Virginia and North Carolina in the 1990s, I will continue to think that Harvey Gantt was a victim of the Bradley effect in both his runs for Senate against Jesse Helms and that Doug Wilder was elected Governor of Virginia only because he had such a large lead in the polls - much larger than his margin of victory!
That said, until a similar analysis shows analogous data for Virginia and North Carolina in the 1990s, I will continue to think that Harvey Gantt was a victim of the Bradley effect in both his runs for Senate against Jesse Helms and that Doug Wilder was elected Governor of Virginia only because he had such a large lead in the polls - much larger than his margin of victory!
