Have we seen Barack do this before? Or is this one of the classic pathological signs of being the Democratic nominee?
I have the feeling that Democrats do this Pecksniffian gesture more often than Republicans. Am I wrong? Time to accumulate an image archive. Send in your links! ]]>
Ahhh, the magic of peer review:
The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors RetireHere's some good news for Dick Dawkins:Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who [are] less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.
At Stanford a divided anthropology department reunited last year after a bitter split in 1998 broke it into two entities, one focusing on culture, the other on biology.Going on:
[A] new study of the social and political views of American professors [found that] “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third."Moderatism!" There's a conceptual breakthrough for you! What, one wonders, are the tenets of moderatism? Presumably "the truth lies somewhere in between" must figure prominently. You know: a male chauvinist thinks that women are inferior to men. A feminist thinks that women are the equals of men. A moderatist(*) thinks the truth lies somewhere in between.When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.
“These findings with regard to age provide further support for the idea that, in recent years, the trend has been toward increasing moderatism,” the study says.
The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old.It's certainly easy enough to be a Democrat and a moderatist. In fact, it's difficult to be a Democrat and anything else.
But here's the really good news:
... moderation can be found at both ends of the political spectrum [e.g.] A seminar on great books at Princeton jointly taught by two philosophers, the left-wing Cornel West and the right-wing Robert P. George.O the lion lies down with the lamb! But which is which? And who is dinner? ]]>
Ahh, so what if we're back to a job force the size of the one we had last year at this time. Things move so slowly these days. But then again the next six months might see this pace swiften. The ability to plow under jobs, even in good times, is quite impressive -- at least it always impresses me.
Gross job loss from all sources -- quits, fires, layoffs, liquidations, retires, etc. easily can run up into the two million range each and every month. 25 million jobs reaped away, every year
Imagine if the system simply stopped replacing us dispensables. Why, off the solid 5% base we got now, in just a year's time we could reach 21% joblessness. Soup lines! Hoovervilles! Dance marathons!
See how kind these corporations are, taking us in like they do. It's always possible they might not.
Back to the here and now: it takes a net 100k new jobs per month to absord all the entrants and re-entrants into the marketplace. A quick calculation tells us if we're down absolutely by 450k since last December, and if we add in 6 months' worth of these missing 100k shiny new opportunities, then we discover -- as the great Krug did today -- we're, yikes, a million jobs short.
Will the job market's current doldrums spell electoral doom for Hanoi Johnny? Is he suitable for framing as America's latest job drought Judas goat? Is that alone enough to once again shoot down the air pirate? _ ]]>
If you have substitutes that have high fixed costs and long lead times, you can deter their entry into a market by a price cycle that dips below the alternative products' long-run break-even price fairly often, but can stay near or even above it for prolonged periods.
Hence the infamous glut-to-scarcity act of big oil in the late 90's -- low prices, low low low drilling for new pools. It seems unlikely that the future demand cycle at least ten years out was completely beyond the range of Houston tower telescopes. But it's always smart to underestimate demand growth in times of supply slack. It's a really cool mechanism to deter sustainable alternatives -- at least, alternatives that would need to cover their costs: i.e. market-based ventures.
In a world where the state steals and never builds; where it taxes to punish and exploit, not to induce optimizing changes in choice -- hell, isn't it obvious? You greens are playing right into their con, and their periodic massive earth-wide windfalls.
Watch: when they're good and ready -- when wind sun and tide are ready to ramp up the alternatives -- discovery and new levels of recovery will explode; prices per barrel of crude tumble; sustainable green earth-friendly alternatives -- languish.]]>
For subscribers:
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/07/3644n.htm
Pentagon's New Social-Science Program Stirs Old AnxietiesThe Pentagon has learned a valuable lesson: find the most respectable front you can, and then suborn it. "Peer review"! The holy of holies! The very best whitewash to use, if you've got a really foul sepulchre that needs touching up.In September 1965, not long after news reports spotlighted a controversial Pentagon-sponsored program to study social conflict in South America, the Social Science Research Council played host to a meeting on overseas research.
Feelings were raw. Opposition to the Vietnam War was mounting, and many scholars worried that the Pentagon's research on conflict and counterinsurgency would bring all overseas researchers under suspicion as agents of American military power. According to Seymour J. Deitchman's The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 1976), a central theme of that 1965 meeting was whether, if the Pentagon really required research on such topics, it "couldn't be obtained by some independent, 'objective' agency, such as the National Science Foundation."
.... In April, Robert M. Gates, the secretary of defense, announced the Minerva Research Initiative, a Pentagon-financed, university-based social-science program whose purpose is to study the Chinese military, cultural dynamics in the Islamic world, and other topics of interest to the military.
... The president of the American Anthropological Association released a statement urging that such research be funded not by the Pentagon, but by agencies with "decades of experience in building an infrastructure of respected peer reviewers" like the National Science Foundation.
...[O]n Monday afternoon, the Pentagon signed an agreement that will facilitate collaborative social-science projects with the National Science Foundation... The anthropologists' wish has been at least partly granted.
... [T]he program's supporters hope that it will play a... role in rebuilding trust between social scientists and the military. In his speech announcing Minerva, Mr. Gates referred to "academics who felt used and disenchanted after Vietnam, and troops who felt abandoned and unfairly criticized by academia during the same time."Gates was at least a bit more balanced than his prospective new boss.
In an interview last month, Thomas G. Mahnken, the Defense Department's deputy assistant secretary for policy planning, said... "We believe that the government will benefit and the nation will benefit if we have a larger cadre of scholars who are conversant in primary-source Arabic documents, for example."Translation: The overburdened CIA needs a sort of ladies' auxiliary.
He added that he hoped the NSF's peer-review process would give the program credibility among scholars.No doubt his wish will be gratified. Once the holy water of "peer review" has been sprinkled about with a free hand -- what evil spirits could possibly remain? Besides, these people have... money... for grants! Now there, if you like, is some serious holy water.
But the best is yet to come:
Among the most visible skeptics is David H. Price, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Saint Martin's University and the author of a new history of World War II-era anthropology. Mr. Price says that even when the military solicits social scientists' insights, those insights are often ignored.So let me see if I follow you, David: the problem with giving the Devil advice is that... the Devil doesn't listen?
Mr. Deitchman ended his memoir with a proposition that almost no one in the current Minerva debate is likely to find palatable. After witnessing a decade of angry Congressional hearings and bitter arguments within social-science organizations, he concluded that publicly financed social-science research was hopelessly politicized and that the federal government should, by and large, wash its hands of the entire business.And no doubt the answer will be the same. All the other answers seem to be the same -- or worse. I'm still reeling from Anthony Lake -- Obama's foreign-policy Yoda -- telling us recently that our mistake in Vietnam was leaving too soon. ]]>No matter whether they work for the Defense Department or for less controversial agencies, government-financed social scientists are in danger of swallowing "the values and outlook of the bureaucracy," Mr. Deitchman wrote. But in a new time of war and cross-cultural conflict, it's impossible to imagine that the federal government will follow Mr. Deitchman's advice and retreat from social-science research. The question now, as in 1965, is which agencies will steer that research.
Rewarding good behaviorKos always had a soft spot for Wesley Clark. I don't know why. I don't think I want to know why.So many of you are upset that I pulled back my credit card last night, making a last minute decision to hold back on a $2,300 contribution to Obama. Let me explain further:
First of all, obviously Obama is a great candidate who is running a great 50-state race. That much cannot be denied. But he's had a rough couple of weeks.
First, he reversed course and capitulated on FISA....
Then, he took his not-so-veiled swipe at MoveOn in his "patriotism" speech.
Finally, he reinforced right-wing and media talking points that Wes Clark had somehow impugned McCain's military service....
Kos continues:
...[T]here is a line between "moving to the center" and stabbing your allies in the back out of fear of being criticized. And, of late, he's been doing a lot of unecessary stabbing....Let me see if I've got this right. Kos correctly feels that he and his coterie have been "stabbed in the back," seduced and abandoned, thrown aside with every mark of contempt now that their modest usefulness is over. But he still wants the stabber to win; plans to vote for him; may yet send him the money.I'm not going to start praising Nader or Barr. I'll still vote for [Obama]. Yadda, yadda, yadda. At the end of the day, I'm pretty irrelevant in the whole affair. Obama is going to raise a ton of dough and win this thing whether I send him money or not.
Ultimately, he's currently saying that he doesn't need people like me to win this thing, and he's right. He doesn't. If they've got polling or whatnot that says that this is his best path to victory, so much the better. I want him to win big....
Others will happily pick up the slack. We're headed toward a massive Democratic wave, and what I decide to do with my money means next to nothing....
Something very strange going on in those brains. ]]>
The prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is the biggest threat facing the world, according to one of Barack Obama's senior foreign policy advisers....
In an interview with the Financial Times, Anthony Lake, a former US national security adviser who has worked with Mr Obama since the start of his campaign, also urged the US to learn lessons from its traumatic withdrawal from Vietnam regarding pulling out of Iraq....
Mr Lake depicted the Democratic candidate as a tough-minded realist rather than an anti-war politician....
He stressed that Mr Obama, even after withdrawing troops from Iraq over 16 months as he has promised, would maintain "a residual presence for clearly defined missions". These would include military training, and "preparedness to go back in if there are specific acts of genocidal violence".
"That is not 'cut and run and let's just see what happens'," Mr Lake said.....
Highlighting a parallel with his first posting as assistant to Henry Cabot Lodge, a US ambassador in 1960s Saigon, he said: "It is common sense that we could not leave Vietnam successfully unless we left behind a government in Saigon that could govern successfully.
"It seems obvious in retrospect; it was not obvious enough to too many politicians at the time. In Iraq it's the same problem."...
Mr Lake was sympathetic to aspects of Mr McCain's idea of a League of Democracies, one of the centrepieces of the Republican's foreign policy plans.
...[H]e backed the general idea of a grouping that was "not an anti-Russian device but an effort to find ways for the democracies to act together on issues of defence of our common values . . . specifically on issues when the UN can't act".
Even that notion might be difficult to digest for European countries wary of offending Moscow or seeming to sidestep the UN. But as Mr Lake's words indicate, Mr Obama could yet be a demanding partner for the rest of the world.
So Obama is "not anti-war." I was always taught that in English a double
negative added up to a positive.
I really wonder -- not for the first time -- why so many people think the Democratic party is more anti-war, or rather less pro-war, than the Republicans.
It's interesting too that the ancient campaign to keep Russia in a box -- which dates back to well before the US was Top Country, and has now entered its third century under the new management -- seems to be cranking up again. That was high on the agenda in the Clinton years, but seems to have been rather back-burnered under Bush.
Plus ca change: Palmerston and the Whigs were always more interested in an aggressive policy against Russia than the Tories were. Although the parallel is a bit inexact; there really are no conservatives in the 19th-century sense anymore, and certainly none in the Republican Party.
Still, it's fun in a grim kind of way to hear these themes and motifs recur. ]]>
Usually I hate Talmudic posts that reprint the text, with the blogger throwing in an occasional catcall from the peanut gallery, but Barack is such a remarkable and unusual talent, and his twists and turns have so much dramatic interest, that it seems right to depart from standard procedure:
We reflect on these questions because we are in the midst of a presidential election, perhaps the most consequential in generations....Here of course we have a central Democratic Party trope -- last unveiled in the Most Important Elections Of Our Lifetime, two years ago. This observation is aimed at all the useful liberal idiots who may have started to waver in their faith as Barack has plunged rightward since winning the nomination. If you love your children and grandchildren -- vote for me! Even though I'm a fink!
But here's Thoughtful Barack again:
After all, throughout our history, men and women of far greater stature and significance than me have had their patriotism questioned in the midst of momentous debates. Thomas Jefferson was accused by the Federalists of selling out to the French. The anti-Federalists were just as convinced that John Adams was in cahoots with the British and intent on restoring monarchal rule. Likewise, even our wisest Presidents have sought to justify questionable policies on the basis of patriotism. Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans - all were defended as expressions of patriotism, and those who disagreed with their policies were sometimes labeled as unpatriotic.Well, that got my attention. especially the sword-and-shield thing. Whose motto was that? Let me see... ah, well, who remembers? But then, in a classic on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand move, our man goes on:In other words, the use of patriotism as a political sword or a political shield is as old as the Republic. Still, what is striking about today's patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s - in arguments that go back forty years or more. In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic.
Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day.Scorecard: the promoters of the Vietnam War were guilty of "questioning" people's patriotism. But the other side attacked the very idea of America itself, burned flags, spit on returning soldiers, etc. I think the counterculture lost this round, don't you?
Thoughtful Barack comes back -- temporarily:
[T]he anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments - a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic...Wait for it --
... and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.Spitting on the flag again! They just can't stop doing it!
Shifting into lyrical mode again:
I remember, when living for four years in Indonesia as a child, listening to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." I remember her explaining how this declaration applied to every American, black and white and brown alike; how those words, and words of the United States Constitution, protected us from the injustices that we witnessed other people suffering during those years abroad. That's my idea of America.The guy is good, isn't he? But here's what comes next:
As I got older, that gut instinct - that America is the greatest country on earth - would survive my growing awareness of our nation's imperfectionsUh-oh. When the "greatest country on earth" shows up, it's time to duck and cover. And indeed:
... [P]atriotism is... loyalty to America's ideals... It is the application of these ideals that separate us from... Iraq, where despite the heroic efforts of our military, and the courage of many ordinary Iraqis, even limited cooperation between various factions remains far too elusive.He lost me with our "singular greatness". I really couldn't read on. Oh, yeah, I know, his defense attorneys -- and they are legion -- will say this is what you have to do in order to be elected. To which I can only respond: In that case, I can't begin to care who gets elected.I believe those who attack America's flaws without acknowledging the singular greatness of our ideals, and their proven capacity to inspire a better world, do not truly understand America.
]]>
Foreign Policy magazine -- "Where the world’s top thinkers come to debate the most salient issues of the day," as the mag modestly describes itself -- recently ran a beauty pageant for the top 100 "top thinkers" of the world. (What exactly does a top thinker do to a bottom thinker, I wonder? But I digress.)
It's a sad list. Noam Chomsky makes the cut -- but he's only No. 11, right above notorious craniac... Al Gore! The loathesome Richard Dawkins is no. 19. Salman Rushdie(23), Vaclav Havel(26), right above Christopher Hitchens[!]... so far it's mostly the Academy Of The Overrated(*), but it quickly turns to downright comedy with Thomas Friedman(40), David Petraeus(65), and Lawrence Summers(67). I'm certainly glad the general edged out Harvard's pride. Porky Larry must be hopping mad about that.
Man oh man. If these are really the "top thinkers" of the world we are in much deeper trouble than I thought.
--------------
(*) Thanks to Woody Allen for this key concept. ]]>
Before New Labour was invented, the Labour party was more sympathetic to the Palestinians. Jon Mendelsohn of the Labour Friends of Israel has explained how it changed: '"Blair has attacked the anti-Israelism that had existed in the Labour Party. Old Labour was cowboys-and-Indians politics, picking underdogs to support, but the milieu has changed. Zionism is pervasive in New Labour. It is automatic that Blair will come to Labour Friends of Israel meetings."']]>One of Blair’s first acts on becoming an MP in 1983 was to join Labour Friends of Israel. But the major change only occurred after he rose to control of the Labour party. To carry out his planned policies, he needed to try to break the funding influence of the trade unions. So he needed an ally with ample funds.
In 1994, a legal friend and colleague of his, Eldred Tabachnik, Q.C., the former president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, introduced him to Michael Levy, a pop music mogul and fundraiser for Jewish and Israeli causes....
Levy expressed his willingness “to raise large sums of money for the party” if there was a “tacit understanding that Labour would never again, while Blair was leader, be anti-Israel”.
The result: Levy ran the Labour Leader’s Office Fund to finance Blair’s campaign in the 1997 General Election. Levy in effect made New Labour possible....
But, Blair needed a constant source of funds if he was to reduce the influence of the unions – and, it seems, he needed to hide its source lest it be questioned. One of the better known figures at Labour Friends of Israel is David Abrahams, a Jewish property developer.... Abrahams took on part of the task of secretly funding New Labour. He gave more than £650,000 to the Party under four other people’s names – a move since admitted to be unlawful by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown but which has had no legal consequence....
Levy became our “special envoy” to the Middle-East despite having a serous conflict of Interest. He was supposed to negotiate impartially with Palestinians and Israelis but he had acted as a fundraiser for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak as well as lobbying for Israel in the UK. He has both a business and a house in Israel and calls himself an ‘international Zionist.’...
Gordon Brown
Gordon is more personally immersed in Zionism than Blair. It is something he grew up with in his childhood. He told a recent gathering, ‘I have been proud to be a member of Labour Friends of Israel over three decades. My father used to spend many weeks in Israel, he was the chairman of the Church of Scotland’s Israel Committee. He went on visits to meet people twice a year for more than 20 years.’
... One of Gordon Brown's first acts after assuming the Prime Minister's role was to accept an appointment as Patron of the Jewish National Fund founded in 1901. The Israeli government sold to this Fund the land seized from Arab refugees – and then made this land only available for Jews to settle on. It planted forests over the uprooted olive trees of former Palestinian settlements. It currently owns about 14% of Israel....
[Brown] has ensured continued Jewish funding of New Labour by appointing Mendelssohn of Labour Friends of Israel as his chief fundraiser for the next election. He has also appointed former British ambassador to Israel, Simon McDonald, as his chief foreign policy adviser. Israel has expressed satisfaction with the choice, saying he is "a true friend to Israel."... [Brown's] new Middle East Minister is Kim Howells, a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel. The Director of Labour Friends of Israel is David Mencer, a former volunteer for the Israeli Defence Force.
Let's do the parallel universe thing:
Let's imagine what would have happened
if, instead of the rocky reign of the Stuarts, Britain had
endured the lesser evil of
three consecutive Elizabeths. Would that green and
perfidious island have "ended up in complete servitude"?
So claimed the magnificent Diderot: "Two or three consecutive reigns of a just and enlightened despotism... is one of the great misfortunes of any free nation."
Sound to you like the possible pending Obama anni mirabiles? Recall that the three consecutive terms of the New Deal saved corporate America to march triumphantly under the victory arch of world war two right smack dab into the heyday of the American century.
Is this why, on some tacit, crumbling-infrastructure mind level, we rads fear Obie's success far more than his failure? Is this why we root for dismalitude? Why are we so fond of spoiling the ballots of Lady Liberty -- while she remains on the limited liability plan? ]]>
In defiance of traditional party labels, Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, may ask the defence secretary of President George W Bush to stay on if he wins the White House.
Obama’s top foreign policy and national security advisers are pressing the case for keeping Robert Gates at the Pentagon after he won widespread praise for his performance. The move would be in keeping with Obama’s desire to appoint a cabinet of all the talents.....
Richard Danzig, an adviser to Obama on national security and a former navy secretary, said: “My personal position is Gates is a very good secretary of defence and would be an even better one in an Obama administration.”
The appointment would cause a furore among Democratic party activists but would have the advantage of providing continuity at a time when Iraq appears to be stabilising and demanding more independence from America.
Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution in Washington, a foreign policy adviser to Obama, said: “Robert Gates is one of the best defence secretaries we have had in a long time and it makes a lot of sense to keep him.”
Gates, a former member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, was initially sceptical about the troop surge in Iraq and has been quietly seeking an orderly transition to a new US administration in January so that hard-won military gains in Iraq are not thrown away in a hasty withdrawal.
At one stage last year, he had hoped that 60,000–70,000 US troops could be withdrawn by Christmas this year, but he was persuaded to back more modest reductions by General David Petraeus, the US commander. ...
Gates showed he was comfortable working with Democrats when he appointed John Hamre, a former senior official under Bill Clinton, to serve as chairman of the influential Defence Policy Board last year. He also appointed William Perry, a former defence secretary who is advising Obama, to the board....
James Carafano, a defence expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, said Obama would be making a “smart move” if he asked Gates to carry on. [Gates] has clearly adopted a mainstream course on national security that would be acceptable to either McCain or Obama.” Surprise, surprise. But here's the best:
Speculation intensified this weekend that Obama may offer Hillary Clinton the position of health secretary after he appointed Neera Tanden, her senior policy director and a key architect of her healthcare plan, to his campaign team.Aiieee! Once wasn't enough? Spare us, Pharaoh! Spare us! ]]>
I had a pleasing thought the other day.]]>Barack Obama's candidacy may be the thing that ends the surefire support of the Democrats among Black people.
Not among all of them, certainly, but maybe there will be enough peeling away from the party to make things difficult for the lesser head of Orthrus. Now that we actually have a Black candidate, and he's being forced to turn his back on his own people, treat them with scorn, and spit upon (at least half) his heritage, many may wake up to the fact that the Democrats are responsible for this state of affairs. That they're just taking the Black vote for granted, so Black people can be treated with as much derision as is needed to win back some of those who yearn for the white-hooded days of the Democratic Party's past.
The disgust and discontent could be made more palpable by the fact that nobody can excuse it as the candidate's own private white supremacism coming out, as they might with a white Democratic nominee. It will be clear that this is the structural white supremacism of the Democratic Party.
May I suggest this line of reasoning to you green goblins to munch along with the morning latte? You want reduced consumption of oil -- fair enough; but you're great believers in some variant of wealth as equal as possible too, aren't you?
Now you guilt-drenched strivers, then ask yourself this: Is there today a long run real price of crude that maximizes the rate of adjustment? And if there is -- if there's a price beyond which we're just shooting extra superfluous cash at the corporate swine -- then are we at it, above it, or below it?
I say we're above it, cellmate -- well above it. And I say remember the little folks. Don't we need to factor out any global economy-wide slowdown effects on total consumption these hypothetical uber-plus price hikes might lead to? Shouldn't starve-the-beast strategists avoid setting up a a regular-guy deparment? Even Malthus had his limits. In other words: the income effects on total household consumption of everything including oil need to be compensated, don't they?
As the late Sir Johnny Hicks might say: to substitute is divine but to consume is human.
Here's a brief overview of Johnny's nice distinction.
To cut to the chase: just what might the crude price be that would maximize the adjustment rate? My guess: 60 to 80 dollars oughta be more than enough to sustain the development and production of alternative sources of energy. Anything higher is pure windfall -- a serious production of pleb-prole misery gone to waste. ]]>
Obama is nothing if not fast on his feet. The Cool Young Black Dude is transforming himself, faster than the Incredible Hulk, into a Bloodthirsty Reactionary Asshole. You won't like me when... I'm the nominee.
Background: the Supreme Court decided by a narrow 5-4 majority that you can't be put to death unless you've actually killed somebody. So we're not quite yet back in the palmy days of serious justice when you could be hanged for just about anything. But Mister Change We Can Believe In wasn't happy with this namby-pamby stuff:
Obama Condemns Supreme Court Decision in Child Rape CaseI don't know which bit of prose pleases me me more. The contenders are:Barack Obama criticized the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision today striking down the use of the death penalty in cases of child rape.
“I disagree with the decision...." [he said].
The expected Democratic nominee said he believed the rape of a child “is a heinous crime” that fits the circumstance, siding with the four conservative justices who sit on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.
Obama, like Alito, disagreed with the decision because its impact would mean a blanket prohibition on the use of the death penalty. In his dissension, Alito wrote that the decision means the death penalty would not apply “no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted, and no matter how heinous the perpetrator’s prior criminal record may be.”
Expected Republican nominee John McCain also disagreed with the court’s decision....
Obama’s criticism—and alliance with the court’s conservative judges—may come as a surprise to some Democrats, but the Illinois senator has made notable steps toward the center of the political spectrum in recent weeks.
But even so, the idea that this ghoulish Jack Ketch stuff represents the "center" has got to take pride of place.
It's too bad Obama isn't a southern Governor, like Clinton. Otherwise, it seems certain that he would not only fly home to supervise the conveniently-scheduled execution of some slightly darker-skinned citizen -- he'd probably pull the switch himself.
]]>