Given the choice . . . Repubs prefer lies

Maybe it's just human nature, or maybe the human nature of Republicans is just different from the rest of us.

Given the choice between believing misinformation that echoes their failed political ideology and information that is objectively demonstrated to be true -- there's no contest. Republicans, at least the variety that seem to control the GOP today, will choose the former. Prime example: trickle down economics: believing against evidence that cutting taxes for the wealthy is the answer to every economic problem.

And Condi Rice will believe until her dying day that Sadaam Hussein was a threat to the U.S. She said, through gritted teeth in a recent interview, anyone who denies it is just not facing reality. Yeah? You mean like the missing WMD? That reality, Condi? Or do you really mean that they had some oil we could use?

The latest case in point: Osama bin Laden's body had hardly reached the bottom of the sea when the Bushies revived the old argument about whether torture works. Someone said that some small bit of information was maybe obtained from one detainee under "harsh" interrogation eight years ago. Now, it turns out that he did maybe sort of hint at the identity of one of bin Laden's curriers. Voila !! Rumsfeld claims vindication for torture. See !! We got info that led us directly to Osama.

Not so, is the counter claim, discussed on HuffPost by Dan Froomkin. In fact, torture may actually have prolonged the hunt. Citing what an Air Force interrogator said in 2006:

"I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden." . . .

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier -- information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality,

"they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us."

It seems that one detainee gave a nickname for a courier, and it's not clear that he gave it up during torture; while two others who were most harshly tortured -- one was waterboarded 183 times -- continued to deny knowing him. So it was 2 against 1, and it was the ones who got the worst treatment who kept denying any knowledge of the courier.

Froomkin then quotes from a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, where

"trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment."

Another military intelligence officer with extensive experience has studied interrogation techniques. He said:

"By making a detainee less likely to provide information, and making the information he does provide harder to evaluate, they hindered what we needed to accomplish."

Liz Cheney, John Yoo, and Donald Rumsfeld all claimed vindication for the Bush team's methods. But answer me this, folks: If you guys got the info through torture, how come you didn't catch bin Laden? You had six years with this information.

Bush could have had bin Laden's beard to add to Sadaam's gun in his trophy room.

Obama's press secretary Jay Carney pushed back:

"It simply strains credulity to suggest that a piece of information that may or may not have been gathered eight years ago somehow directly led to a successful mission on Sunday. That's just not the case."

In 2012 the choice will be up to the American people as to which team they want to run the show. I vote for the more honest one -- which happens to be the one that actually did capture bin Laden -- and the one that respects experience and evidence-based policy over blind allegiance to ideology and fixed ideas.

Ralph

Inner curmudgeon #6

My curmudgeon cup runneth over. This one is especially galling.

Last year, after a lengthy, well-conducted appeals trial, Federal District Judge Vaughan Walker ruled that California's Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. His order was stayed pending appeal.

Proponents of Prop8, who have appealed the decision, have now filed two court challenges:

1. To have the decision thrown out, based on their claim that Judge Vaughan should have recused himself because he is gay.

Actually, they claim it's not that he's gay but that he's in a long-term relationship with a man. In view of the possibility that he might then want to get married, he was biased on the case.

Come on, we didn't just fall off the turnip truck. If you're straight, you wouldn't be biased about a marriage issue; but if you're gay, you necessarily are? In that case, no man should rule on a gender-discrimination case -- nor a woman either. We'd have to breed a genus of asexual beings to be judges.

2. They also demand to have the video-recording of the trial proceedings sealed and off limits to the public.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled out the live broadcast of the trial as it was in progress, but it was video-recorded and stored in the court archives. Judge Walker, now retired, recently played a small segment of the testimony in connection with a talk he gave that was broadcast on CSPAN. Now the other side wants to prevent any further release of the recording. Presumably the written transcript is available as a public record, as all are all trial records unless ordered sealed by the court.

You know why they don't want it shown? Because people would watch what was actually introduced as evidence in this public trial on an issue that was voted on by the people; and, if people watch it, they will get educated about the real evidence and the real issues.

And mostly (obviously) they want to suppress it, because the case against Prop8 was so brilliant and thorough, while the case for it was so pathetic that it would be a humiliating embarrassment, as it was in court.

Given their day in court to make the case for denying an equal right to marriage to same-sex couples, the only argument they had was "it's tradition and overturning it will harm the institution of marriage." That was it, essentially. No facts, nothing to back it up but religious beliefs and tradition.

Never mind. The tide has already turned. If this case is not the final death knell, it will come soon.

Ralph

You say . . . I say . . .

The Affordable Health Care Act (H.R. 3962), which Republicans have dubbed "ObamaCare," is under attack. They have reportedly given up on chances for total repeal, knowing that the Senate would not go along and that Obama would veto it.

So they're chipping away, the prime target being the mandated universal participation. States are suing to have that declared unconstitutional.

They say: "You can't force people to participate in commerce."

I say: "Fine. Let's use the power to tax."

Simply drop H.R.3962 and expand Medicare to cover everyone -- and raise taxes to pay for it.

That way everybody is "given" health care rather than forced to buy it. Like all the other advanced Western nations, who get better overall health care at far less cost.

OK? Agreed? You don't want to be forced; we'll give it to you -- and then make you pay for it. I could live with that.

Ralph

Change of pace

A Jewish friend sent me some "Jewish haiku." I'm the first to insist that you don't have to be Jewish to have had a "Jewish mother." Southern fundamentalist mothers can be every bit as guilt-inducing and infantalizing. So my stereotyping is multi-religious. The difference is that their children have not yet acquired the salving grace of wit to deal with it.

Here are some that made me chuckle with recognition [with annotation for some of my friends who may not know the associations].

Today I am a man
Tomorrow I will return
to the seventh grade.
[Bar Mitzvah]

On Passover we
opened the door for Elijah.
Now our dog is gone.
[leaving the door open for Elijah is part of the Seder]

Testing the warm milk
on her wrist, she sighs softly
But her son is forty.
[no explanation needed]

Sorry I'm not home
to take your call. At the tone
please state your bad news.

Is one Nobel Prize
so much to ask from a child
after all I've done?

A lovely nose ring,
excuse me while I put my
head in the oven.

Jewish Buddhism:
If there is no self,
whose arthritis is this?

Inner curmudgeon #5

There's political bloviation and obfuscation, and there's campaign excess and outright lies.

And then there's the appalling behavior of pretend-journalists that is so biased that it becomes unprofessional and unethical. That's where my inner curmudgeon gets roused.

No one does it as often as the denizens of Fox television network. They're at it again, and it's deplorable.

I have my own ambivalence about the morality of assassinating an unarmed man, even of the likes of Osama bin Laden. I am relieved that he is no longer in the world, and I might very well have given the same order that President Obama did, given all that he had to consider -- sort of like shooting a mad dog in the streets even though it's not in an act of killing that requires immediate self-defense.

The questions here though are philosophical and moral.

FoxNews is just being political -- and, I submit, committing unprofessional journalism (the word 'journalism' hardly even applies to Fox).

Two different Fox anchors have called killing the unarmed Osama "illegal."

Here's what rouses my inner cur:

1. We know, as well as we know the sun will rise tomorrow, that they would not be doing so if GWBush were the president who gave the same orders.

2. We know that the denizens of Fox have led the pack in calling Obama weak and ineffective on foreign policy and war-waging. Now that he's done what they demanded he do, they say it's illegal.

3. We know that if news had leaked that this opportunity to take out Osama had arisen and Obama had not taken it, they would have (figuratively) dragged Obama's body through the streets.

Listen UP, FoxNews: don't try to peddle to this old curmudgeon your tired political smears wrapped in the bloody gauze of morality and integrity. You have none.

None. Absolutely none.

Bah humbug.

Ralph

American enterprise

Newsweek's reporter Daniel Stone tweeted the following:

"Obama got Osama" t-shirts for sale at Farragut Square. Now that's America.

In 12 hours after the announcement of bin Laden's death, American enterprise had already started to cash in. Why don't we have people with that kind of initiative solving the jobless situation?

Ralph

Bin Laden

So we finally killed Osama bin Laden.

My feelings are mixed. I do not rejoice in anyone death, especially not a killing, But bin Laden terrorized the world, was responsible for thousands of deaths, American, Muslims, among others. The world is better off without him.

But here is the irony of the date:

It was exactly 8 years ago, May 1, 2003 that George W. Bush put on his aviator costume and flew onto an aircraft carrier that had been turned around so the TV view wouldn't show it to be in the San Diego harbor but would look like it was out to sea. Because actually the carrier was within helicopter range and could have deposited him on deck without all the heroics of our warrior president bringing in a carrier landing of a fighter jet.

There, under the banner "Mission Accomplished" Bush gave his declaration that major combat operations have ended in Iraq.

That was a little off too -- we could almost claim it now 8 years later.

Obama looked every bit the commander in chief in making his announcement tonight. This should quell -- for a bit, anyway -- talk of him as too weak to handle our foreign affairs.

Not so.

Ralph

Beating a dead horse #6

Adam Liptak, writing in the Sunday New York Times, has a somewhat different reading of the King & Spalding withdrawal from defending DOMA.

He suggests that we have rapidly arrived at a tipping point in public opinion, and that it was this, more than internal struggles on gay marriage among its own staff, that led K&S to take the unusual step of backing out of a contract to defend the House of Representatives in a challenge to the constitutionality of one of its own laws, one that the Obama Justice Department decided not to continue defending.

Liptak writes:

For many gay rights activists, the decision amounts to a turning point in the debate -- the moment at which opposition to same-sex marriage came to look like bigotry, similar to racial discrimination and the subordination of women."

Of course, here he's attributing the assertion to "gay rights activists," but the the tone of the rest of his article supports that view.

It's important to distinguish the point Liptak is making -- a genuine change in social attitudes akin to changing view of race and gender discrimination, not "caving in to pressure" from important clients and staff and gay activists.

I agree that changing societal attitudes is a strong factor. I think K&S's commitment to diversity and to its own gay staff may have put them a bit ahead of the curve among law firms -- but not far ahead. Liptak also points out that the legal profession as a whole has been a leader in acceptance of equal rights for gays and lesbians.

Another factor that no one else seems to consider: K&S's assessment of whether they could make a plausible defense of a bill that, at least in parts, has been deemed unconstitutional by legal scholars. That was the DoJ's rationale for no longer defending it. Maybe it really boils down to this: K&S did not want to take a case they would lose, perhaps look both naive and bigoted in trying to defend, and at the same time alienate their own staff, some of their clients, and much of society.

Ralph

What a week

Lots of important events this past week:

1. Two billion people worldwide watched the wedding of England's future king Prince William and Kate Middleton, hopefully ushering in a new era for a royal family rocked by bad-news scandals involving princes behaving badly. Amid inevitable comparisons to the ill-fated marriage of Charles and Diana 30 years ago, we might hope that the royals decide to skip over tarnished Charles and Camilla and put the fresh and appealing William and Kate in place as soon as 85 year old grand-mum Elizabeth is ready to retire.

2. The late Pope John Paul II will be beatified in Rome today, hopefully ushering in a new era for a Roman Catholic Church rocked by bad-news scandals involving priests behaving badly. John Paul's fast-track to sainthood cleared a major hurdle with the certification of his intercession in the miraculous cure of a nun from Parkinson's disease. Two miracles are required for sainthood. Too bad he couldn't miraculously cure all the little boys of the lasting sexual trauma inflicted on them by abusing priests during his years as pope.

3. President Obama pulled out his birth certificate and pulled the rug out from under the strident birthers and Republican wannabes, hopefully ushering in a new era of campaigning on the vital issues of the day. Not likely: Donald Trump simply took credit for forcing the president to do show and tell; and then he pivoted and claimed that Obama wasn't qualified to attend Ivy League Schools and must have gotten in Columbia and Harvard through affirmative action -- which pretty well proves the racism behind it all. At last night's White House Correspondents Dinner, SNL comedian Seth Meyers shot back that he was surprised to learn that Trump was running for president as a Republican, because he had just assumed he was running as a joke.

4. Georgia's Governor Nathan Deal signed into law the bill that allows local municipalities to hold referendums on retail sale of alcohol on Sunday in their jurisdiction, hopefully ushering in a new era of declining dominance of religious conservatives over our political process. This was no rash decision: I remember in my high school years when our "dry" county held a referendum about sale of alcohol, period, not just on Sundays. The ladies of the Women's Christian Temperance Union thought it was their Christian influence that kept us dry, but it was really the bootleggers who worked behind the scenes for the same cause but from different movites. You know, politics and its strange bedfellows.

5. Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding pulled out of its contract to defend the Defense of Marriage Act for House Republicans, hopefully ushering in a new era that will lead eventually to nationwide legalizing marriage for same-sex couples. K&S found itself between a rock and a hard place when its high profile appeals attorney Paul Clement took the case but signed a contract that included a gag order prohibiting anyone at K&S from speaking positively about gay marriage for the duration of the case. K&S prides itself on promoting diversity, it actively recruits to hire gay and lesbian attorneys, and boasts about it's 95% equality rating from gay-rights watchers. Well-known and out gay lawyers in the firm, who had nothing to do with the case, would have had to keep quiet about gay marriage for, probably, the next several years while the case meanders.

Once the contract was signed, there was no win-win solution, but they made the right one. Clement left the firm for a more conservative one in Washington and will take the case with him, so the Repubs still have their attorney of choice; K&S retains its reputation for fairness and equality and respect for the rights of its staff.

And that was the week that was.

Ralph