There were considerable signs that the proposal was put together quickly ...
Lisa: Look at all these great ideas for preventing crime! I know they're oversimplified and can't possibly work, but wow! Marge: Hmmm, if only we didn't already have a precrime solution. Bart: Speaking of precrime, I don't care about precrime. I'll meet you ladies back here in half an hour.
(Poster on wall of Nelson's bedroom: "Nuke the whales.")
Lisa [to Nelson]: "Nuke the whales?" Nelson: "Gotta nuke somethin'." Lisa: "Touchè."
On Friday, a deeply divided House rebuffed President Bush's demand for retroactive immunity, then defiantly left Washington for a two-week spring break.
Republicans said the secret session proved to be deflating, not because of the quality of the evidence, but because of Democrats' unwillingness to listen.
Host: Now, folks, I don't wanna alarm ya, but scientists say forty percent of America's pictures ... are hanging crooked.
[the audience gasps in shock]
Host: Yep, it's true. And I hear you asking: "Well, who's gonna straighten out all these artistic abominations?" Your friends? A neighbor? Those fat cats in Washington?
[chuckles]
Host: Good luck. Hey, you know, maybe no one'll notice! Maybe the problem will just fix itself.
Here's Harvard's Lawrence Summers, whose assets are clearly in derivatives based on shorting the market:
Three months ago it was reasonable to expect that the subprime credit crisis would be a financially significant event but not one that would threaten the overall pattern of economic growth. This is still a possible outcome but no longer the preponderant probability.
Even if necessary changes in policy are implemented, the odds now favour a US recession that slows growth significantly on a global basis. Without stronger policy responses than have been observed to date, moreover, there is the risk that the adverse impacts will be felt for the rest of this decade and beyond.
In January 2008:
In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.
He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.
As they've just displayed, career Congressmen are voters, too. And with elections only a few weeks away, they are acutely sensitive to the near-term prospects of suffering.
In June 2008:
This is a data-heavy presentation from two economists at CIBC World Markets. You'll have to make your own soundtrack. See how China dominates the growth in demand for natural resources. See how much is accomplished by Americans' purchase of hybrid vehicles, in the face of massive market growth in Russia and China. Watch how gasoline hits US$7/gallon by 2012. Watch ethanol peter out and energy capacity fall short. Watch the Case/Shiller HPI continue to plummet as delinquencies soar. And so much more!
To a great extent, the sleeping American populace has woken up to the fact that there is a problem with the way that they operate their society. ... People want to do something about it. Unfortunately, by all accounts, the dialog even years later is wanting.
People seem to grasp onto oversimplified solutions ... This demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scope of the issue.
I have always felt that these problems were systemic and structural rather then limited and specific, and that we are unlikely to be able to see them, understand them, or address them as a society because we do not want to change the things that we would need to change.
A parting thought:
“People loved comedies during the depression, too,” said R. J. Cutler, executive producer of “Flip That House.”
Initially I thought Palin just hadn't been paying attention [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and didn't know what she was saying. But as her comment continues to reverberate, her intention becomes increasingly clear: this was not just an offhand or ignorant remark, but rather a big Fuck You to the Supreme Court and its decisions over the last four years. And in this she stands in league with McCain [and Yoo and Addington et al], echoing his disdain for the foundation of democracy.
Anthony Lewis writes:
Three times in the last four years the Supreme Court has rejected the Bush administration's legal defenses of its program for detention of alleged "enemy combatants."
Each of these decisions brought an outcry from the political right. Senator John McCain, a survivor of torture as a prisoner in North Vietnam who was once a critic of the Bush detention practices, called Boumediene "one of the worst decisions in the history of the country."
Opening the federal courts to habeas corpus applications from the detainees hardly promises them a swift ticket to freedom. But it marks at least a first step toward accountability—a forum where the treatment of a detainee and the asserted reasons for his imprisonment can be examined. As George Will wrote in a column blasting Senator McCain for the ignorance of his comments on habeas corpus, "the Supreme Court's ruling only begins marking a boundary against government's otherwise boundless power to detain people indefinitely."
A striking example of the importance of having courts check official decisions that someone is an "enemy combatant" is the case of Huzaifa Parhat, one of a number of Uighur Muslims from China who are in Guantánamo. Parhat, who the US military claimed was at a Uighur training camp in Afghanistan in 2001, was captured in Pakistan in the fall of 2001. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found in June that there was no persuasive evidence to support the government's labeling of him as an enemy combatant. The panel included the court's chief judge, David Sentelle, one of the most conservative federal judges in the country. Its opinion ridiculed the government argument, comparing it to the statement of a Lewis Carroll character: "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
It was in St. Paul last week that Palin drew raucous cheers when she delivered this put-down of Obama: "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights."
But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.
Calling it "the foundation of Anglo-American law," he said the principle "says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' And say, 'Maybe you've got the wrong person.'"
"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting."
Palin's quip was troubling; I'm pleased to see Obama call her on it, but I don't expect her to seriously engage the subject. It was a throwaway line for her.
Here are two threads on the subject from earlier this year:
Benjamin Wittes’ Law and the Long War is required reading for anyone interested in the legal challenges posed by the war on terror.
Six years after the September 11 attacks, America is losing a crucial front in the ongoing war on terror. It is losing not to Al Qaeda but to its own failure to construct a set of laws that will protect the American people—its military and executive branch, as well as its citizens—in the midst of a conflict unlike any it has faced in the past.
