The latest word is that the new administrator is going to be Charles Bolden. I remain disturbed by the Abbey connection. It will be interesting to see what Augustine comes up with, and how it’s received.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the NBC story.
Al Sonja Schmidt has some thoughts on how the media treats women on the two sides of the aisle.
The biggest borrower in the history of the known universe lectures college students not to live on credit. Of course, to be fair, they can’t print their own money.
I think that chutzpah is a pretty good word for Nancy Pelosi accusing anyone else of lying about the torture briefings.
I wonder if Hoyer is really going to mount a coup? I hope not — I think that a continuation of Speaker Pelosi is worth a lot of Republican votes a year and a half from know.
[Update early evening]
Who’s lying, Nancy or the CIA? Go take the poll.
To paraphrase the first commenter, is this a trick question?
[Update a few minutes later]
Apparently, the speaker has never learned the first rule of holes:
I won’t rehash the now familiar provisions that explain what torture is. But I do want to focus our attention on a prong of the torture statute, Section 2340A(c), that hasn’t gotten much notice to this point:
Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.
So I ask myself, “Self, what difference does it make whether Speaker Pelosi knew the CIA was waterboarding suspects or merely knew the CIA was planning to use waterboarding?” Answer: None.
Unless a victim is killed by torture such that the death penalty comes into play (which is not alleged here), American law regards conspiracy to commit torture as something exactly as serious, punished exactly as severely, as actual torture. As it happens, I don’t think waterboarding as administered by the CIA was torture. But Pelosi says she does. If that’s where you’re coming from, how do you get off the hook by saying you only knew about a plan to torture but not actual torture?
To establish torture conspiracy, a prosecutor wouldn’t even have to prove an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. You just need to show that two or more people agreed to commit the prohibited act. Here, though, by her own account (or at least one of her own accounts), Pelosi knew the CIA was planning to use waterboarding and later learned it was actually being done. So, if Pelosi was told — as the CIA says she was — that waterboarding was being used, that’s another nail in the coffin. But for a prosecutor, it’s just gravy — not at all necessary to the case. As Pelosi herself tells it, she was aware of a conspiracy to torture — which is just as significant under the law as torture itself — and she did nothing about it.
Someone should take away this idiot’s shovel.
Let’s cure aging.
Works for me.
Some idiot left a comment on a month-old post overnight about government health care:
> Because I get my health insurance through my employer and unless they change the carrier, I don’t have a vote on that.
Sure you do. You get to choose your employer, at least for now.
I note that you don’t get to choose your govt.
It’s called an election.
I guess that was supposed to be some kind of clever riposte, but it’s stupid. Or disingenuous.
One of these things is not like the other. If I want to change my employer, no one can stop me (or at least no one can stop me from leaving my current one). So far, at least. It is a matter between me and my employer, and my future employer. It is not a matter dependent on what millions of maleducated ignorant voters think.
I do not get to choose my government. If I did, I can assure you that I would have had a much different government for my entire life. In a democracy, you only get to choose your government if you make the same choice as the majority of other voters. Otherwise, you get their choice, not yours. In my entire life, I’ve never gotten my choice, or anything close to it. Which is why it’s best that, given it’s one-size-fits-all, government have as little power as possible, and that it be devolved down to the lowest level possible, as the Founders intended.
But the only choice that the Dems seem to want me to have is whether or not to have an abortion.
Obama isn’t what they thought he was:
…the heavy hitters who thought that Barack Obama would end up being the second coming of Bill Clinton should have known better. First, due to large, unaccountable flows of money and an ideological determination not seen 16 years ago, the formal and informal organizations Obama and his handlers (not necessarily in that order) have built and maintained are far more sophisticated than anything Clinton, James Carville, and his other advisers ever assembled. More important, Obama’s core radicalism far exceeds that of even Clinton’s wife Hillary on her worst day. The fact that the media mostly covered up Obama’s extreme positions and associations to dumpster-dive in Alaska may excuse the ignorance of the masses; but it doesn’t excuse that of the elites.
Idiots. Useful ones.
[Mid-morning update]
Rules for a radical president:
After Obama took office, the pundit class found itself debating the ideology and sensibility of the new president — an indication of how scarcely the media had bothered to examine him beforehand. But after 100 days, few observers can say that Obama hasn’t surprised them with at least one call. Gays wonder why Obama won’t take a stand on gay marriage when state legislatures will. Union bosses wonder what happened to the man who sounded more protectionist than Hillary Clinton in the primary. Some liberals have been stunned by the serial about-faces on extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention without trial, military-tribunal trials, the state-secrets doctrine, and other policies they associate with the Bush administration. Former supporters of Obama, including David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Jim Cramer, and Warren Buffett, have expressed varying degrees of criticism of his early moves, surprised that he is more hostile to the free market than they had thought.
Obama’s defenders would no doubt insist this is a reflection of his pragmatism, his willingness to eschew ideology to focus on what solutions work best. This view assumes that nominating Bill Richardson as commerce secretary, running up a $1.8 trillion deficit, approving the AIG bonuses, signing 9,000 earmarks into law, adopting Senator McCain’s idea of taxing health benefits, and giving U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown 25 DVDs that don’t work in Britain constitute “what works best.” Obama is a pragmatist, but a pragmatist as understood by Alinsky: One who applies pragmatism to achieving and keeping power.
I fear that’s one thing that he’ll be competent at.
The Democrats don’t have a waterboarding exit strategy:
For Democrats…the damage could be significant. Nancy Pelosi already has lost a great deal of credibility from her changing stories. Dozens of other Democrats, including such senior Senators as Jay Rockefeller, apparently also were briefed on the interrogation methods and either were silent, approved, or encouraged the policy.
The irony is that a full blown investigation and hearings will turn mostly on what the Democrats knew, and when they knew it. The Republicans mostly couldn’t care less if they were “blamed” for keeping the country safe even if it necessitated waterboarding the mastermind of 9/11 to prevent further attacks. When faced with sacrificing a city versus using harsh interrogation methods, most voters would opt for harsh interrogation.
That the Democrats have more to lose is demonstrated by the looming fight between Democrats in Congress and the CIA. The Democrats are complaining that the CIA is out to get them through selective leaks of documents. These are the same Democrats who cheered when the CIA leaked information damaging to Bush administration policies. So that complaining is going to go nowhere.
Other foot, meet shoe. Frankly, I find this hilarious.
…therefore, we need universal care. Megan McArdle, on the insanity of that “argument”:
I hear this argument quite often, and it’s gibberish in a prom dress. Any cost savings you want to wring out of Medicare can be wrung out of Medicare right now: the program is large and powerful enough, and costly enough, that they are worth doing without adding a single new person to the mix. Conversely, if there is some political or institutional barrier which is preventing you from controlling Medicare cost inflation, than that barrier probably is not going away merely because the program covers more people. Indeed, to the extent that seniors themselves are the people blocking change (as they often are), adding more users makes it harder, not easier, to get things done.
It’s not an argument. It’s sophistry in the service of socialism.
One of the disengenuous tactics of the Democrats in support of Porkulus was to imply that conservative economists agreed with it, and in fact they actually lie about this. For instance, the other day, I heard Governor Rendell defending Arlen Spector’s vote on it by saying that. But what conservative economists agreed on was that some sort of stimulus was needed, not that legislative atrocity. One of the economists slandered thus was Martin Feldstein, who has a piece in the Journal today on the potentially disastrous effects of upcoming tax cutsincreases on the economy.
The current outlook for an economic recovery remains precarious. Although the stimulus package will give a temporary boost to growth in the current quarter, it will not be enough to offset the combined effect of lower consumer spending, the decline in residential construction, the weakness of exports, the limited availability of bank credit and the downward spiral of house prices. A sustained economic upturn is far from a sure thing. This is no time for tax increases that will reduce spending by households and businesses.
As Tigerhawk notes, “You cannot spread wealth that hasn’t bee created in the first place.” But so-called liberals think that wealth is something that just happens, and that all that need be done is to properly distribute it.