Quote of the Day

Kevin Drum:

When the subject has anything to do with sex, the right in America is the party of moral absolutes.  We know what’s right, we know what’s wrong, and even if there’s a price to pay we can’t shirk our responsibility to set a proper example and do the right thing.

But when the subject is torture, suddenly it’s all about carefully weighing the costs and benefits.  Having an honest debate about how far we should go to protect ourselves.  Understanding the context of what happened.  It’s just not possible to flatly say that waterboarding and sleep deprivation and stress positions are barbarisms unfit for use by a civilized country.  It’s much more complex than that.

Barack Obama – Still Popular

The latest polling out of the Pew Research Center shows President Obama with a consistently high job approval rating.  Here is a quick chart showing his job approval rating from February to present:

This is all by way of noting that the Politico’s Jon Martin had an article today exploring why the GOP’s attacks against Obama have fallen flat, and in it, he goes through the standard list of reasons: the country has shifted to the left, the economy has crowded out most other concerns, and young people have an increasingly prominent voice.  But he fails to consider the simple idea that Barack Obama is popular because the rhetoric of Barack Obama the candidate match up very well with the actions of Barack Obama the candidate.  And since Barack Obama the candidate was fairly popular, it’s not much of a surprise that Barack Obama the president is fairly popular.

Black Protestants Are Skeptical of Global Warming

Via the Pew Forum:

I understand why white evangelicals are skeptical of human-caused climate change; there is a very strong anti-science strain in American evangelicalism, dating back to conservative Protestant’s clashes with their liberal and modernist counterparts in the late 19th century.  But I’m not really sure what explains or accounts for black Protestant’s skepticism of human-caused climate change.  It could be another example of conservative theological beliefs clashing with modern science, or it could be indicative of a distrust for science which I think has some currency in the broader African-American community.  Or, alternatively, it could be something else entirely.  What do you all think?

The Emerging Pro-Police State Consensus

It’s long been the case that Washington elites are possessed of an overly rosy picture of American “hard” power and its efficacy; in the Beltway, the regular use of military force is praised as “tough” and an unwillingness to negotiate in good faith is regarded as “principled” and “necessary.”  But this is a manageable problem; there are still plenty of political elites who hold more moderate or opposite views, and it’s possible envision a status quo in which there isn’t a tremendous political cost to pursuing a more “dovish” foreign policy.  Truth be told, the thinly veiled militarism of our political elites it isn’t nearly as troubling as what seems to be the emerging elite thought on the use of torture, and an immensely powerful executive branch more generally.

Basically, what you’re hearing from various outlets of elite opinion is something along the lines of this, “Yes, we understand that the Bush administration constructed and authorized a program of clandestine torture, and yes, we understand that it was built on a dubiously legal foundation.  And yes, we get that this is as clear an example of executive branch overreach – and even lawbreaking – that we’ve had in a very long time.  But, we still can’t tie the president’s hands, because there are bad guys out there who want to hurt us.”  David Ignatius says as much in a column expressing his apprehension at the release of the torture memos.  After all, he argues, we don’t want to “blind” America’s “shadow warriors.”  In today’s New York Times, Roger Cohen makes a similar argument; indeed, he’s actually pretty forthright about his unwillingness to prosecute anyone who authorized torture, broke the law, and tarnished cherished American principles:

So I’m wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America’s checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

Those checks and balances are recovering now. I don’t think this recovery would be served by prosecutions, either of C.I.A. operatives or those who gave them legal advice. Such legal action, if initiated, would split the intelligence services and the military in paralyzing ways at a time when two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are still being fought. The country would be lacerated.

John McCain, himself a torture survivor and joined by Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, declared that prosecution would have “serious negative effects on the candor with which officials in any administration provide their best advice.”  And everyone’s favorite “moderate’ Republican, Arlen Specter, was quoted as saying that prosecuting officials who broke the law is more appropriate for a “banana republic” or “Latin America” than it is for the United States.  Judging from this, and the Beltway’s docile reaction to last year’s FISA revelations, our political elites have graduated to a higher view of executive power.  It isn’t enough that the executive branch has near total control over foriegn policy, and can invade other countries at (effectively) the drop of the hat.  No, the executive branch must have near unlimited powers to do whatever it pleases, whenever it pleases, with the guarantee that it will never be held accountable for its crimes or missteps.  These people are clamoring for a police state, and the terrifying thing is that they’re likely to get it.

Onward Christian Soldier!

Here’s former Bush speechwriter (and sanctimonious moral scold) Michael Gerson in a recent interview with conservative activist Hugh Hewitt:

I think it’s a terrible error for a couple of reasons. One of them is that I think that the release of these memos, and now the talk of these prosecutions, is creating an atmosphere in which people in our intelligence services, people in our government, are going to be very timid about pursuing absolutely essential elements in the war on terror. This is creating an atmosphere that’s more like the pre-9/11 atmosphere when people were complacent and afraid to confront these problems. And I’m afraid that we’ve returned to that attitude, that we’re going to return to some of those outcomes eventually. And so I think it’s a serious challenge. Now let me make one more point here, which is if there are going to be investigations of people who knew about these things, and who approved of them, then that’s going to have to include Nancy Pelosi and Senator Rockefeller, who were both briefed, along with other members of the Intelligence community in Congress about thirty times on all of these techniques beginning in 2002. The fact of the matter is that this represents what was happening in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The intelligence community had no idea if there were going to be further attacks, how large the al Qaeda network was in the United States. And they were pursuing by their best lights, according to their best legal interpretation, matters that they thought were essential to American security. You can’t criminalize that. [Emphasis mine]

As Sullivan correctly notes, this is total bullshit.  The Bradbury memos were written in 2005, well after 9/11 and more than enough time for the White House and intelligence agencies to make a calm, reasoned assessment of the security threats facing the United States and respond with appropriate interrogation procedures.  This isn’t a case of a few hot heads in the CIA desperately waterboarding a prisoner to obtain improtant information, no, this is further proof of what most informed observers have known for at least a year (if not more): the Bush administration crafted and authorized a policy of systemized torture, designed to humiliate and break prisoners suspected of plotting against the United States.

Although Sullivan suggests that Gerson is either ignorant, a liar or both, I’m willing to roll with Gerson’s claim that he was shut out from group discussions on interrogation and detainment policies.  If the world of the “West Wing” is at all like the real world, it’s not unreasonable to think that a speechwriter wouldn’t be privy to this kind of information.  That said, in this interview Gerson all but endorses the Bush administration’s use of torture, which only underscores the extent to which Gerson’s public Christian persona rests on a morally and theologically bankrupt foundation.  In this, Gerson is almost a stand-in for the conservative evangelicalism writ large, which has spent the past eight years in almost complete fealty to a corporatist and militaristic (with a nice touch of sadism) conservative ideology.  To borrow from Charles Marsh’s excellent book Wayward Christian Soldiers, Gerson and his ilk worshiped a Christ who “storms into Baghdad behind the wheels of a humvee.”  It’s no surprise that Gerson supports torture and is nearly unapologetic about his support for the Iraq War; he is utterly captive to power and its allure (I’d also argue that he sees the United States as an agent of divine providence and the recipient of God’s blessings, but that’s another post).

*On a seperate but related note, you should take the time to read Stephen Suh’s post on the decline of religion in the United States.

2001: A Blog Odyssey

While the previous post was the 2001st post, I forgot to mark the occasion, and so instead I will celebrate by marking the 2002nd post.  I don’t really know what to say; the blog has grown considerably since I started it two years ago (though, I do wish I had a little more traffic), and has played a significant part in my growth as a writer and a thinker.  Beyond that, the blog has faciliated relationships with some of the most interesting and intelligent people I’ve ever met (most of whom you can find at Campus Progress), and opened up a bunch of really interesting opportunities (in fact, this blog is forcing me to reconsider my current “five year life plan.”).

So, with that said, you can think of this post as a thank you: to my co-bloggers, to my fellow college bloggers, and to the readers and commenters who make this blog worth continuing in the first place.  Hopefully I won’t disappoint you too much over the next 2000 posts.

On a somewhat different note, here is a post about Japan!

The New York Times’ has two really good articles on related aspects of the Japanese government’s attempt to remedy unemployment stemming from the global economic downturn.  Last week, the Times’ reported on a recent effort by the Japanese government to push unemployed and underemployed youth in the farming sector:

As the Japanese recession has worsened, younger workers have taken the brunt of wage cuts and layoffs, especially in manufacturing. Now the government views the slump — Japanese exports fell almost 50 percent year-to-year in February — as a chance to divert idle labor to sectors that have long suffered from worker shortages, like agriculture. Many young Japanese, for their part, have shown a growing interest in farming as disillusionment rises over the grind of city jobs and layoffs. Agricultural job fairs have been swamped with hundreds of applicants; one in Osaka attracted 1,400 people.

Today the Times’ reports on a new measure by the Japanese government to remove foreign laborers from Japan:

In 1990, Japan — facing growing industrial labor shortage — started issuing thousands of special work visas to descendants of these emigrants. An estimated 366,000 Brazilians and Peruvians now live in Japan.

The guest workers quickly became the largest group of foreign blue-collar workers in an otherwise immigration-adverse country, filling the so-called three-K jobs (kitsui, kitanai, kiken — or hard, dirty and dangerous.)

But the nation’s manufacturing sector has slumped as demand for Japanese goods evaporates worldwide, prompting job cuts and pushing the jobless rate to a three-year high of 4.4 percent. Japan’s exports plunged 46 percent in March from a year earlier, and industrial production is at its lowest level in 25 years.

So Japan has been keen to help foreign workers go home, thus easing pressure on domestic labor markets and getting thousands off unemployment rolls.

At the moment, relocating “foreign” workers and directing those jobs towards young Japanese sounds like a good idea, but assuming the Japanese economy doesn’t collapse in on itself and begins to expand in the next few years, and assuming that Japan remains an export-based economy, it’s by no means a stretch to say Japan will face a serious demand for workers in a relatively short period of time.  What’s more, as has been mentioned by many commentators, Japan is facing negative population growth and can’t “naturally” replace workers who retire or pass away.  By removing foreign laborers and barring them from returning in the future, Japan is depriving itself of a set of well-adjusted, assimilated workers who would make up for the country’s long-standing labor shortages.  On the whole, these sound like a set of well-intentioned, but really short-sighted policies.

Do high taxes and union density exacerbate the effects of a recession?

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Jim Lindgren presents data from the Labor Department showing that the six states with the highest unemployment rates – Michigan, Oregon, South Carolina, California, North Carolina and Rhode Island -  have relatively high state income taxes and union density, while the opposite is true of the six states with the lowest unemployment rates: Iowa, Utah, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and North Dakota:

Putting this together, 3 of the 6 states with the highest unemployment (California, Oregon, and Rhode Island) have both high marginal income tax rates and high union representation. Michigan has high unionization but moderate marginal income tax rates, and the Carolinas have high marginal income taxes, but low unionization rates. [...]

I would put less emphasis on my analysis of the LOW unemployment states because they are all in the upper Great Plains. But the HIGH unemployment states are otherwise quite diverse (from the West Coast to New England to the upper Midwest to the Carolinas). What they share are high marginal income taxes or high unionization or both.

This strikes me as a really silly way to evaluate the impact of income taxes and union density on the effects of a recession.  For starters, if we use Lindgren’s method/data and simply evaluate unemployment, taxes and union density, there are plenty of states which have low unemployment and high(er) taxes/union density: New York has a marginal income tax rate of about 7 percent, a very high union representation rate (25 percent), and a relatively low unemployment rate (7.8 percent).  The same is pretty much true of New Jersey (8.3 percent unemployment, which is higher but not too high, 19.8 percent union representation, tax rate of about 9 percent) and Massachusetts.  I wouldn’t say that there isn’t a relationship between taxes, union density and the effects of the recession, but that nothing in Lindgren’s limited, fuzzy picture suggests that there is.  Indeed, it’s really quite obvious that this is more an attempt to justify his ideological prejudices; he gives short thrift to particulars of each state.  Is unemployment high in South Carolina because of its high income taxes, or is it because South Carolina is currently captive to a governor who is reluctant to take any steps to jump start the economy?  Is unemployment high in Michigan because of its high union density, or is it because key Michigan industries are taking a beating in the recession?

Lindgren is a professor of law at Northwestern University and from the looks of things, he’s a bright guy and a reasonably talented academic.  At the risk of sounding a little condescending, he would do well to analyze economic data with an eye towards intellectual honesty and not conservative ideology.

(Not Just) Knee Deep

Via Andrew Sullivan is the New York Times reporting that  Nancy Pelosi was one of the key congressional leaders who – back in 2002 – received a fairly thorough briefing on the CIA’s “covert anti-terror investigation program.”  What’s more, it doesn’t seem like she was particularly bothered by techniques.  In fact, as Sullivan notes, the briefed members of the intelligence committee were less concerned with the legality of the techniques, and more worried about whether or not they were adequate to the task of collecting “intelligence”:

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who in 2002 was the ranking Democrat on the House committee, has said in public statements that she recalls being briefed on the methods, including waterboarding. She insists, however, that the lawmakers were told only that the C.I.A. believed the methods were legal — not that they were going to be used.

By contrast, the ranking Republican on the House committee at the time, Porter J. Goss of Florida, who later served as C.I.A. director, recalls a clear message that the methods would be used.

“We were briefed, and we certainly understood what C.I.A. was doing,” Mr. Goss said in an interview. “Not only was there no objection, there was actually concern about whether the agency was doing enough.”

You should look no further than this if you’re wondering why it’s very unlikely that we’ll see anything resembling a “truth commission” with regards to the Bush administration’s torture program.  The simple fact is that high-ranking members of both parties played a considerable part in advancing, obscuring, and defending the Bush administration’s lawlessness.  With various prominent Democrats knee-deep in the Bush administration’s moral cesspool, it’s nearly delusional to think that Democratic leadership will endorse a full accounting of the torture program.  Of course, I’d love to be proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.

links for 2009-04-21

• Rock is Black Music, Too
  As a black rock music nerd, I feel validated by this piece.
• Struggling to Rise in Suburbs Where Failing Means Fitting In – NYTimes.com
  "About one in four youths in the United States are immigrants or children of one, and most appear to be elevating fine: working, studying and advancing at rates comparable to nonimmigrant peers. But a troubled minority offers cause for alarm."