Al Sonja Schmidt has some thoughts on how the media treats women on the two sides of the aisle.
The Audacity Of Audacity
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.
Pot, Meet…
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.
A Novel Solution To The Medicare Problem
Let’s cure aging.
Works for me.
Happy Seventh Blogday
…to Alan Boyle. Here’s to many more years.
I’m Pro-Choice
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.
Shocked, Shocked
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.
They Should Have Thought Of That Before They Released The Memos
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.
Medicare Is Going To Bankrupt Us
…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.
A Canine Turing Test
Jonah Goldberg writes about one of his favorite subjects today (no, not that one) — dogs:
Charles Darwin, a true secular saint of the modern age if ever there was one, loved dogs unreservedly. And, in The Descent of Man, he marveled at the ability of dogs to love back. He noted how even “in the agony of death, a dog has been known to caress his master.”
But even Darwin was a sucker, apparently. Eric Zorn, a writer for the Chicago Tribune, recently mocked a local woman, Jess Craigie, who dove into near-freezing waters to save her dog from drowning. Zorn wrote, “Note to Jess Craigie: Your dog still doesn’t love you.”
Zorn’s source for this dog slander is Jon Katz, who despite his name has written mostly wonderful stuff about dogs. Zorn uses an unfortunate quote from Katz to peddle the fashionable notion that dogs are, in the words of science writer Stephen Budiansky and others, “social parasites.” According to this theory, canines are evolutionary grifters that have fooled humans into believing they are our friends. “Dogs develop very strong, instinctive attachments to the people who feed and care for them,” Katz told Zorn. “Over 15,000 years of domestication, they’ve learned to trick us into thinking that they love us.” (In his book Soul of a Dog, Katz is far more nuanced about the nature of canine affection, suggesting a quid pro quo of food for love. Here, Katz is out of the bag.)
Emphasis mine.
It seems like the age-old hubris that man is so unique that other animals can’t think, or have emotions, or even feel pain (Descartes believed that the obvious distress of the animals that he was vivisecting was just reflexes, and had nothing to do with actual sensation). Of course, some take this to the absurd length of believing that human infants are insensate as well, and used this to justify surgery without anesthesia on them even in in recent decades.
But ultimately, we can’t know with any certainty what’s going on in another creature’s head, be it a dog, a baby, or even our closest loved ones. We have to make assumptions based on external behavior. The brilliant computer programming pioneer Alan Turing understood this, and decided to assume that if someone, or something, acted as though it was intelligent, and self aware, that it probably was. Thus he came up with the famous Turing test to judge whether or not a machine entity had achieved sentience and even sapience. Unless we’re sociopaths or extreme autists, we make this assumption every day with people with whom we interact.
I would say that the old saying about ducks contains multitudes of wisdom, and if it walks and quacks like a loving dog, Occam would suggest that we assume that Fido (or in his case, Cosmo) loves us, in his own dog-like way. And while I’m sure that Jonah would be appalled at the notion, I’m sure it applies to cats as well (again, in their own way). Jessica sleeps on us, she nuzzles us, she gently taps my cheek when she wants to be fed, she never deliberately scratches me, even when I’m doing something she doesn’t like (like giving her a bath). While she spends much of the day ignoring us and doing other things, and doesn’t need the constant reassurance and attention that a dog does, she is the most affectionate and adoring cat I’ve ever had, and I’m sure that she has a sense of comfort and completeness when we’re around, and if it’s not love, what is it? I don’t think she’s faking it.
I think that where Katz and his fellow deniers get off track is that the animals didn’t evolve to pretend to love us. That would be a lot of work, evolutionarily speaking, it seems to me. It would require the ability to deliberately deceive, which is a higher cognitive function, and one that apes have but that I’ve never seen cats or dogs exhibit (unless Katz’ theory is true, of course). It makes a lot more sense to think that we have simply bred them over the millennia to love us, selecting the friendlier ones for breeding, and discarding those without affection for us. Just as telling the truth is easier than telling a lie, because you don’t have to keep your stories straight, the easiest way for something with less intelligence to appear to love is to actually love — no act required.
So when someone says that animals don’t love us, they only pretend to, I don’t know what that even means. It sort of reminds me of the old joke that the Iliad wasn’t written by Homer, but another ancient Greek poet of the same name. They have evolved to love us, and we have co-evolved to love them, and why question it any further?