Month: October 2009

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues McCain Politics The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

Why Do Republicans Oppose Net Neutrality?

[digg-reddit-me]The motto of the Republican Party these days seems to be this: If you’re not getting traction opposing something the Obama administration is doing, then make shit up and oppose that.

This was the approach to health care reform and it’s the approach to cap-and-trade legislation (which had been the Republican, market-based approach to dealing with climate change until Democrats came on board.)  The Republican and right wing opposition to net neutrality provides yet another example of this. It’s not that there are no legitimate grounds to oppose these and other Obama administration positions – libertarians and paleoconservatives have found many – it’s just that the Republicans and right wing media figures opposing it choose instead to pretend that what is being proposed is some fantastical evil scheme.

In this case, they are pretending that net neutrality is (a) a radical change rather than a preservation of the internet as it is; and (b) would create an “internet czar” who would “police content” and force conservative bloggers and website owners to put liberal content on their websites. This is not even close to being true!

Network neutrality is an essentially conservative principle – meaning that it seeks to preserve a core principle of the status quo. (SavetheInternet – a pro-net neutrality group – has a good FAQ page if you’re unfamiliar.) Internet service providers (the companies you pay to be able to get onto the internet) in seeking to find new ways to make even more money want to not only charge you to get onto the internet, but to charge companies with websites to be able to reach you (or to be able to reach you quicker.) Doing this would radically undermine the internet as it is and could easily lead to the entrenchment of any big company willing to pay to best its opponents rather than the company with the best idea.

Net neutrality was a fairly uncontroversial idea as late as 2006 – attracting broad bipartisan support in Congress. A libertarian/conservative group – the Internet Freedom Coalition – did oppose it – on the theory that the internet already was regulated enough and no further laws were needed; but the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee still passed the 2006 net neutrality bill 20 votes to 13.

Last summer though, things began to change. I wrote a piece about how money had begun to flow into John McCain’s campaign as well as other Republicans as the cable companies and other opponents of net neutrality began to try to gin up some opposition. McCain himself seemed confused though his campaign had issued a definitive statement saying he was against it (coincidentally right around the time he started to get money from net neutrality opponents.) McCain said in an interview to Brian Lehrer after this statement that he went “back and forth on the issue.” In the interview, he seemed genuinely confused as to what the issue even was.

But as the money began to go to various Republican candidates, and as progressives and liberals began to defend net neutrality, the issue became polarized. Republican and former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, claimed that net neutrality could lead to the regulation of political speech on the internet, calling it a ‘Fairness Doctrine for the Internet,’ which is clearly a Conservative Strawman, as anyone who bothered to do any research about what the meaning of net neutrality was would quickly find out. Even the Internet Freedom Coalition declines to make this exaggerated claim.

Now, the issue has broken into the news again as the FCC is considering writing rules officially adopting net neutrality rather than invoking it on a case by case basis as it has in the past. (Unfortunately, I’m a bit unclear on the distinction being made between guidelines relied upon by the FCC and rules enforced by the FCC.)

And of course, Republicans, having been duly bought and paid for, are now opponents of net neutrality – as rather than conservatively seeking to preserve the structure of the internet, they seek to allow big corporations the freedom to undermine it in any way they find profitable. John McCain who was so confused by this issue just last year now is a leading opponent, introducing a bill this week to prohibit the FCC from protecting net neutrality or any of the other basic principles underlying the internet as it exists now. Marsha Blackburn, a House Republican, has officially taken on the role of the Sarah Palin for the net neutrality debate, as she pushes the limits of public dialogue by demagoguing net neutrality and regurgitating the wacky talking point that net neutrality is the “Fairness Doctrine for the Internet.”

Perhaps in this storyline you can see what it takes to unhinge the public debate from reality: an interest group with money to burn to concentrate the benefits of government policy and disperse the costs.

[Image by -eko- licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
The War on Terrorism

What Do the Taliban, Hannah Montana, and the Beatles Have in Common?

[digg-reddit-me]I thought the most fascinating – and disconcerting – part of David Rohde’s recent installment in the story of his captivity were the references to American pop culture. For example, he writes:

My Taliban guards slept beneath bedspreads manufactured by a Pakistani textile company and emblazoned with characters from the American television show “Hannah Montana” and the movie “Spider-Man.” My blanket was a pink Barbie comforter.

That surreal image though has nothing on the one he gives in closing – as he describes the Taliban pushing him to sing one of my favorite songs with him, their captive:

“She loves you — yeah, yeah, yeah,” we sang, with Kalashnikovs lying on the floor around us.

Somehow these images bring home for me the idea that we lived in a radically interconnected world.

Categories
Criticism Law The Opinionsphere

Mining Right Wing Critiques for Some Honesty

I’ve gotten tired of being outraged at every self-serving lie and every new line crossed and picking apart idiotic arguments by right wingers. This served some purpose during the campaign – and I believe it is important to do when disinformation campaigns are being waged (as during August of the health care debate). But it is not what I feel most comfortable doing.

At the same time, I believe Republicans are undermining the two-party system and our democratic institutions by using their considerable clout to promote fantastical claims and lies about the efforts of their opponents instead of engaging in more pragmatic or fair-minded criticisms. Right wingers who back the Republicans have likewise mainly fallen into this trap – aside from a few notable exceptions (Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, David Frum, Bruce Bartlett, David Brooks.)One of my goals then will be to not only promote these individuals – as Andrew Sullivan for example is – but to read the propagandist crap from more mainstream right wingers and mine it for legitimate criticism.

I’ve had this thought in my head for a few weeks – and have been reading wit this in mind. But when reading items like this by Steve Huntley in the Chicago Sun Times, it becomes very difficult:

Someone’s brain is clearly addled – for there is nothing contradictory about claiming you inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression (which it technically was) and that it is even worse than was thought (especially as several weeks after Biden’s remark, the Department of Commerce released the official statistics revising its statistics down for the past year as it periodically does.)

It amazes me that such paragraphs get past an editor.

Other concerns – while perhaps legitimate – are so self-serving they are hard to reconcile with past views. For example, Wesley Smith over at National Review‘s The Corner did not from my reading of him bring up the subject of the “rule of law” at all during George W. Bush’s presidency. However, now he brings it up with a hard criticism of the Obama administration’s position on medical marijuana:

Part of the sleight of hand here is a subtle mischaracterization of the change. Obama is not “refusing to enforce federal marijuana laws” but rather shifting resources away from targeting these groups, or as Devlin Barrett of the Associated Press described it, prosecutors will be told that “it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.” And Smith doesn’t acknowledge the long tradition (he refers only to Andrew Jackson) of presidents refusing to enforce laws as part of the checks and balances described in most textbooks on the Constitution. Smith also ignores the far more serious violations of the rule of law that Bush committed in actually ordering the law be broken and declaring it void when it violated his duty to protect Americans.

This sudden concern for the rule of law – concern suggesting it was incredibly fragile and can be destroyed in an instant – seems to reinforce the point I made earlier – that the strong positions taken by conservatives regarding curbing executive power and discretion are entirely unprincipled. They have everything to do with the fact that a liberal is now in power and will be abandoned again when they have power.

However, I did find one conservative critique I could endorse: Marie Gryphon’s piece in the National Review that makes the case against scapegoating Ken Lewis of Bank of America. To blame him for accepting the deal he did – especially given the amount of pressure he was under from Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and those working with them is ridiculous. Whether or not there is a legal case against him, it should not be pursued.

Categories
Conservativism Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

The most conservative senator is liberal favorite Olympia Snowe

[digg-reddit-me]Ezra Klein makes a very important observation in comparing Senator Olympia Snow’s approach to health care to more right wing approaches:

For all the talk of Olympia Snowe’s relative liberalism, this is a very conservative answer. It’s not necessarily a Republican answer, or a Tea Partier’s answer, but it’s a small-c conservative answer: It’s respectful of tradition, wary of unintended consequences, and suspicious of excessive ambition.

Klein continues:

[T]he health-care reform plan we’re likely to get is extremely conservative. It builds on the employer-based system, and because that system seems to work better than the individual market, puts in place some new structures to give folks on the individual and small-group markets the same advantages (size, scale and competition, mainly) that seem to have worked for large employers. As I’ve noted before, the basic structure of the plan actually looks a lot like the plan proposed by moderate Republicans in 1994. Only this year, Democrats are proposing it.

The fact that Olympia Snowe is the only currently serving Republican to date to sign onto a bill is substantially similar to what the moderate Republicans proposed in 1994 helps demonstrate – as does so much else – how far from common sense and how far to the right the Republican Party has moved.

To a large degree, the Republican Party is no longer conservative in any meaningful sense – it is a party of reflexively anti-Obama, right wing radicalism.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Criticism Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Former Bush Attorney General: American Justice System Led to September 11

[digg-reddit-me]I already commented on this Mukasey piece – but I wanted to follow up and make clear why this piece from a well-respected “conservative” demonstrates how far the conservative movement, the right wing, and the Republican Party have fallen. First, it’s important to note Mukasey’s position under Bush – as the chief proponent and custodian of our justice system. Second, one should remember that he was long considered a moderate in the party.

Yet Mukasey literally blames September 11 on American values, on the American justice system:

[W]e put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these [previous terrorism] cases…

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents….

Or, as the subhead put it:

We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts. In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.

This is not a conservative approach to the issue. It is a radical one. The accumulated wisdom of our forerunners is thrown out the window in the favor of a shiny, new and “improved” justice system. And even worse the barratuve being built is clearly unhinged from reality. Its only purpose seems to be the same as Cheney’s – to preemptively politicize the aftermath of the next attack. Reading his argument analytically, it’s hard to see how he reaches the conclusion he does regarding the American justice system. The list of deficiencies are all manageable – perhaps with some tweaks – within our legal system. Perhaps they suggest we should try a system of national security courts. But Mukasey concludes instead that they necessitate throwing out our values and the institutions which represent the accumulated wisdom of our democracy.

This leap comes from the narrative. The rationale Mukasey offers is deeper than any of the actual facts he cites – and is emotional rather than logical. For him, September 11 happened because our justice system doesn’t work against terrorism. It is an argument parallel to Cheney’s – that September 11 happened because we were weak – and as a result of this mindset, Cheney set out demonstrating our strength by bullying other nations, withdrawing from treaties, avoiding multilateral institutions, invading Iraq, avoiding the Middle East peace processes, refusing to talk to our adversaries, labeling them evil. But in each case, despite the emotional “logic,” the narrative itself is unhinged from reality.

The fact that a “moderate” in the Republican Party has been so radicalized demonstrates how far from common sense the right wing movement has fallen.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Criticism Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Fallacies of Mukasey

[digg-reddit-me]Michael Mukasey’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday continues to demonstrate the collapse of common sense in the Republican Party. His thesis is that “civilian courts are no place to try terrorists.” His main supporting argument – and the subheadline – suggests that there is a direct link between trying terrorists in a criminal proceeding and September 11. He doesn’t explain the link anywhere in the piece – but as the subhead says:

We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts. In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.

Mukasey himself concludes his piece:

Nevertheless, critics of Guantanamo seem to believe that if we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these cases, then we will reap benefits in the coin of world opinion, and perhaps even in that part of the world that wishes us ill. Of course, we did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. True, this won us a great deal of goodwill abroad—people around the globe lined up for blocks outside our embassies to sign the condolence books. That is the kind of goodwill we can do without. [my emphasis]

The “if…then…” relationship between these two is tenuous – and if you read the piece, you notice that Mukasey does not try to make it. And his laziness is evident elsewhere as he tries to attack Attorney General Eric Holder’s contention that a certain group of terrorists was prosecuted successfully on the grounds that (a) they were not executed because a jury member lied about his willingness to impose the death penalty; and (b) because one prisoner attacked a guard and injured him seriously.

The bulk of his piece does not attempt to further the narrative about how American justice leads to terrorist attacks on America – it instead raises a number of other issues, which have often been gone over. There is some legitimacy to this critique – so I do not mean to dismiss it outright. Phillip Bobbitt and some other legal scholars on the left have used it to make the case for “National Security Courts” which would solely deal with issues of terrorism and national security threats. Mukasey though uses them to make the more radical argument that our justice system itself is incapable of dealing with the threat – and so he proposes a kind of preemptive surrender of values.

These are the basic issues he raises:

  • Trying terrorists would require extra security for judges, jurors, prosecutors, etcetera.
  • This extra security (and additional caseload) would further burden an overloaded system.
  • The court itself would become a target.
  • Trying terrorists in a court would encourage litigation of national security issues.
  • If terrorists are convicted and put into the general prison population, they would be able to try to recruit converts to jihad.
  • Those suspected terrorists held by George W. Bush weren’t treated consistently with American standards of justice – and due to various reasons, we cannot make any case against many of them.
  • Part of our justice system involves the full disclosure of evidence to the defendants; this would allow information to leak, including possibly about intelligence means and methods.

Only the last two are legitimate issues that are difficult to deal with. The first five all have relatively easy solutions if we decide that our American justice system is capable of handling the threat from terrorism. We will provide the extra security. We will hire more judges and prosecutors and get the necessary resources to handle the additional caseload – getting this done would be as much a priority as having enough troops to accomplish a mission in Iraq. We would house terrorists separately from the general prison population – and I haven’t seen anyone suggest otherwise. (Though it’s worth noting that the example Mukasey gives is of a man who was radicalized in prison without being housed with terrorists.)

The issue of what to do with the prisoners George W. Bush was responsible for is a thorny one. Bush and Mukasey left the situation unresolved, and however it is resolved, it will prove politically and legally hazardous. But Obama seems to be approaching this situation pragmatically – and avoiding letting a desire for consistency to constrain him. This is the overall right approach, though the details could obviously be resolved poorly.

Regarding the last issue, Mukasy raises a very salient point – one which a National Security Court would resolve. This issue was also raised with respect to the War on Drugs and efforts to prosecute organized crime, and in each case, a new court with a new justice system was proposed. But our justice system proved able to handle these issues after early setbacks. Perhaps a new court is needed here, as our adversarial system can work to the advantage of organized groups opposing it. This is an issue to be debated – and a serious one. I would tend to believe that our courts – perhaps with some extra rules or procedures designed to mitigate the downsides – can handle these cases.

[Image by threecee licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Politics The Clintons The Media

Hillary Mis-Speaks Again!!!

You have to wonder who’s pushing this story. It reads like a political attack by some opponent trying to undermine Clinton – as the facts are stretched so much to get the necessary spin – but she has positioned herself so masterfully over these past months that it’s hard to figure out who might stand to benefit from taking her down a peg.

In this case, Clinton mentioned during a speech to the Stormont parliament that when she stayed at Belfast’s famous (and famously bombed many times) Europa Hotel, “there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs.” According to research by David Sharrok of the Times of London, this couldn’t have been true as the last reconstruction after a bomb blast at the Europa occurred almost two years before the Clintons arrived. The Clintons first visit to Belfast came just over a year after the ceasefire by the IRA. But while the Bosnia sniper incident could be seen as boosting her own political clout and experience, this seems far more innocent. I would presume she could have easily seen other buildings around Belfast boarded up from bomb blasts, and almost 15 years after the trip confused this detail. For a similar reason, I also never made a big deal of the sniper incident, though I think the controversy over that, while legitimate was exaggerated beyond reason. For this story to get any play at all – let alone to be featured as a major story by the Drudge Report – demonstrates how stupid our media culture can be.

It’s also interesting to see this story pop up shortly after the White House seemed to have fully embraced her, as Jon Heileman reported:

[A]lthough the president himself and Emanuel never had much doubt that she could be a team player, many others in the Obamasphere were supremely skeptical. But no longer. “In terms of loyalty, discretion, and collegiality,” says a senior White House official, “she’s been everything we could have asked or hoped for.”

H/t Kevin Drum who adds his own interesting take – which I wholeheartedly agree with.

[Image by Juska Wendland licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
The Web and Technology

Brief Thoughts for the Week of 2009-10-16

  • My ipod playlists have been making me inexplicably happy this week… #
  • I saw an owl flying over my head on the way home in a kind of slow motion due to a strong wind, almost keeping him flying in place… #
  • How to Explain Something to Someone Who Doesn't Get It [illustrated] http://www.basicinstructions.net/?p=1238 #
  • RT @shitmydadsays "That woman was sexy…Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them." #
  • Once again, my blog seems to be having issues…so my post for the day has not gone up and may very well be lost… #
  • For your convenience, an official apology notice http://imgur.com/iS5vb.jpg #
  • Got my Google Wave invite! #
  • I'm not sure why I am so tired…but my eyes are tearing as I struggle to keep them open. Perhaps beer will help… #
  • It's amusing that it is newsworthy every time a Fox News personality doesn't take the doctrinaire anti-Obama position. http://bit.ly/7er8G #

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Uncategorized

A Reorientation

The inevitable thesis, the thrust of my posts for the past few months has been clear: the right wing opposition to Obama, the Republican party, the conservatives – are now a fractious and generally incoherent force in American politics. They offer virtually no legitimate opposition – instead they lie and throw smears and engage in petty propagandistic techniques – even in their so-called intellectual journals. It’s rare to find any piece of right wing writing that isn’t weighed down by clear and obvious falsehoods. The right wing’s talking points – whether expressed by pundits or politicians – have become almost entirely unhinged from reality.

I don’t mean to suggest that there are no legitimate reasons to disagree with the Obama administration: There is a genuine feeling of discontentment at the root of the deficit politics movement; libertarians and paleoconservatives have mounted substantial critiques of the Obama administration; and the left, especially regarding civil liberties, the wars in the Middle East, and gay rights has also had serious criticisms.

But the Republican Party and the major pundits of the mainstream right have instead engaged in fantastical criticisms – they describe their worst fears and ascribe them to the Obama administration – irrespective of what is actually happening. If the Obama administration is proposing that the government offer a government-run insurance option similar to Medicare which the independent and bipartisanly cited Congressional Budget Offices estimates would attract 1/30th of the American population, then Obama is attempting a hostile Marxist takeover of 1/16th of the American economy! If Obama acknowledges America’s role in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, he is “apologizing for American success” and supporting tyranny and the murder of innocents! Obviously false statements are routinely used as cornerstones in building the case against Obama. There has been virtually no attempt by the right (with the exception of libertarians and paleoconservatives) to seriously engage with the reality of what Obama is doing.

I believe it is important to have a genuine opposition. Any political movement can fall victim to the excesses and blindnesses of its politics if it does not have an effective opposition.

At the same time, I agree with much of the agenda that the Obama administration has – even as I have found myself wary of certain initiatives.

Given all this, I’ve decided to reorient one of the foci of my blog from debunking right wing smears to searching for authentic critiques amidst the smears.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Foreign Policy National Security Politics The Opinionsphere

An Empire or a Just Society?

[digg-reddit-me]Charles Krauthammer wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard that is getting some attention – a piece apparently following up a speech he gave last week. His theme: Decline Is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy.

The criticism from liberals has been fast and furious, swatting away at Krauthammer’s many lies and distortions: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Joe Klein, FireDogLake, Robert Farley.

But from the right, Krauthammer seems to be finding some traction (along with the Cheneys) in creating this narrative about Obama – and his attack has the advantage of being a comprehensive critique of Barack Obama’s administration and its promise. I don’t think the responses from the liberals so far have defused the attack, which I think will gain traction as time goes on.

Krauthammer’s critique is a profound one: that Obama’s New Liberalism – domestically and internationally – makes the conscious choice to let America decline as a global empire. As Krauthammer explains it (updating Niall Ferguson’s more honest description of the choice in his Colossus), America faces a choice between creating a just society at home or maintaining an empire abroad. As a neoconservative, Krauthammer believes we must choose empire because we are the one, special, unique nation, exalted above all others. The declining dollar; the deficits; the withdrawal from Iraq; the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other emerging powers; the scaling back of the panicked urgency in responding to terrorism; the effort to engage in diplomacy; the acclaim for Obama: all of these become points in the Obama narrative being created.

Thus far, the liberal response has been tepid – swatting back the lies and distortions. (For example, most of these dire situations undermining American power are the direct result of Bush administration policies that Krauthammer supported or failed to object to.)

[Image by B MOR Creeeative licensed under Creative Commons.]