Category: Politics

If you believe in curtailing the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans, you’re not alone. In some ways I’m encouraged by these numbers; only 22% of those polled approved of racial profiling. I would have guessed that percentage would be higher. On the other hand, 27% of those polled wanted all Muslim-Americans to register where they lived. Which is atrocious.

Now, I was kind of curious as to what “curtailing civil liberties” meant, so I dug up the original report. I got distracted from that question by worse news: only 27% of the respondents believe that Muslim values are similar to Christian values. 31% said that the media should not report criticisms. 37% don’t think people should be allowed to protest at all. Welcome to America.

I did finally get to the civil liberties question. The infringements in the poll involve the aforementioned registration, closely monitoring mosques by law enforcement agencies, racial profiling, and infiltrating Muslim organizations to keep watch on their activities. Plenty of support for all of those.

Hat tip to Malnurtured Snay.

Whatever happened to Bernard Kerik? Well, it wasn’t just his nanny problem. Josh Marshall has the lengthy summary of Kerik’s issues.

So we’re gonna do the elections differently in 2008. I’ve been thinking about it. I have a plan.

We’re not going to vote for candidates. We’re going to vote for parties. You’ll cast one vote for a party, and you’ll be done. That will simplify things. Every party puts together a list of candidates, with their top candidate at the top and so on. Individuals can run too, but as you’ll see in a moment, it’s not a very good idea.

After everyone votes, we’ll total up the votes. X% of the people on each party’s list will be elected to Congress, where X% is the percentage of the total vote going to that party. So if 55% of the people vote Democratic, then 55% of Congress will be Democrats. Easy and simple. See why it’s bad for an individual to run? If you vote for an individual, then you’re only voting for one person and you have no say in the rest of Congress. Better to vote for a party.

This is not a parable.

“Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned.”

Mark of the Beast! Mark of the Beast!

This wouldn’t be quite as disturbing if they weren’t referring to Falljuah as a potential “model city.” If that’s the model for all of Iraq, I can’t say I’m too optimistic. As always, I have no doubt that these tactics will increase security in at least the short term. As always, I am deeply concerned that we have failed to ask ourselves whether or not increased security is worth the cost.

Of course, once we attacked Fallujah, something like this was inevitable. And once we attacked Iraq, it was inevitable that we would have a rebel city like Fallujah on our hands. (Given the competence level of the people running our country.) It was even predictable.

The invasion of Iraq, however, was not inevitable. It’s no good going back that far and saying “well, we had to invade Iraq.” Alas, the wild horses are now coming home to roost.

Possibly it’s time to come to the conclusion that our government is not very good at preventing prisoner abuses. Yes, it happens occasionally, and a single incident doesn’t mean it’s endemic. But when DIA agents are being threatened in order to keep it quiet, and when the FBI is concerned about generally used coercive techniques, there is a clear problem.

I manage people for a living. After a certain point, if a given problematic behavior pattern repeats, I figure out what the root cause is and I fix it. I do not say “well, that’s just one incident; it’s bound to happen now and again.” If you don’t think that torture is acceptable, you’ve got to ask why Donald Rumsfeld continues to allow this pattern to persist. And, of course, why George Bush doesn’t correct Rumsfeld’s failure to act.

Not complicated.

There was some concern that Harry Reid wouldn’t be a combative Senate Minority Leader. Comes from a red state, so vulnerable to election challenges; moderate; all that stuff.

Harry Reid on Clarence Thomas: “I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I just don’t think that he’s done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.” He then praised Scalia’s intelligence but said Scalia has some ethics problems. So, yeah, the guy has some cojones. I’m betting he’ll make Frist use the nuclear option if it comes down to it.

If you’re still wondering about the vote in Ohio and the exit polls and so on, you ought to be reading Keith Olberman. He’s been covering the story non-stop since the election; it’s probably not too overwrought to say he’s staking his credibility on it. He is also being very careful not to wear a tin-foil hat.

What’s clear at this point is that the Kerry campaign is very quietly working towards a recount in Ohio. The Libertarian/Green effort is acting, consciously or not, as a stalking horse. Jesse Jackson has come on board to do the heavy rhetorical lifting. A guy named Cliff Arnebeck is about to file a contest of election lawsuit, and he looks like he knows what he’s doing.

I don’t expect the recount to change anything, and I don’t think there was voter fraud by a strict definition of the word. I do think there were vote suppression efforts; I think there always are. But I do expect a recount to happen. And yeah, Kerry had it planned all along.

The Red Cross says conditions in Guantanamo Bay are problematic, but won’t confirm a New York Times report that said the Red Cross claims prisoners were effectively tortured.

The official White House response is not exactly conclusive: “We strongly disagree with any characterization that suggests the way detainees are being treated is inconsistent with the policies the president has outlined.” Well, that’s all very well and good, but it’s not entirely clear that it is inconsistent with the Red Cross claims. The President’s policies may or may not authorize actions that are effectively torture, after all.

Go back a few weeks, and you find official US reports regarding abuse at Guantanamo which mesh fairly well with much of what the Red Cross is saying. The parties responsible for events reported therein have been disciplined. The question boils down to whether or not that discipline has been sufficient to curb the problem or not; seems like the Red Cross is saying not.

Who’s telling the truth? Well, the actions described in those reports do not violate the recommendations in the Gonzales memos.

Given the current state of the Ukraine, it is enlightening to look back on the history of Ukrainian nuclear weaponry. The Ukraine doesn’t have nuclear weapons because Senators Nunn and Lugar worked hard to convince Ukrainian leaders not to have nuclear weapons, backed up by government funding.

Funding for Cooperative Threat Reduction peaked under Clinton in 2000 at $475.5 million. In 2001, it dropped to $433.4 million. In 2002, it dropped to $403 million. More on this here (PDF).

The talk on the Dean campaign wasn’t all that interesting — Keri Carpenter talked about how the Dean campaign was shaped by the people, and Tom Limoncelli talked about how it was a great experience and touched on the technology some. Nothing deep. Keri Carpenter did say, at the end, that clearly great netroots wasn’t enough but she didn’t really volunteer any ideas on what would have helped.

Tom Limoncelli said he thought Dean lost because he was anointed the front-runner early and everyone teamed up to bring him down. That latter seems kind of self-defeating to me, since netroots takes some time to build. You wouldn’t want to use a strategy that puts you ahead early if being the front-runner leads to failure.

Me, I think Dean just failed to bring together the strong netroots with a strong traditional game. Give him someone who’s good at ground politics, and maybe he wins. A lot of people are talking about Kerry in 2008, and I think Kerry will likely run, but Dean’s just as likely to take a shot at it if he wants to be President. And he won’t be the guy who gets blamed for anything bad happening between now and then.

Technical tidbits: the Dean campaign was very Tivo-heavy, with one Tivo per major network. They used them for transcription a lot. It didn’t sound like they had a database of video clips, which seems to me like an obvious area for technology. If Curt Schilling can digitize every pitch he throws into a database, I bet a campaign can do the same — it’d make it easier to get attack and defense footage out there. But maybe the speakers just weren’t aware of it.

They got, at peak, over 70K emails per day. Limoncelli mentioned RT3, and I was really interested in finding out how well RT handled that volume, but it turned out that they were planning on rolling out RT the week after Iowa. Ooops.