In purporting to refute Sen. Lindsey Graham's contention that the Obama administration has turned the war into a legal issue, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy proved Graham's point. The Hill reports:
"The red herring that my friend [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.] was covering is not realistic," Leahy said during an appearance on "Washington Journal" on C-SPAN. "For one thing, capturing Osama bin Laden — we've had enough on him, we don't need to interrogate him," Leahy added.
That's September 10th counterterrorism for you. Who cares what intelligence the head of al-Qaeda might be able to give us about ongoing mass-murder plots? Who cares that by interrogating bin Laden at great length we might be able to save lots of lives? The only thing that matters is whether we have sufficient evidence to convict him at a trial beyond a reasonable doubt. Since, by Leahy and Holder's lights, we already have an overwhelming legal case against him, so we don't need to worry about the fact that Miranda means we can't interview him. The litigation will be successful, so therefore it's somehow a national security success, too.
This is exactly the problem Graham homed in on when he told the attorney general:
The big problem I have is that you're criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we'd have mixed theories and we couldn't turn him over — to the CIA, the FBI or military intelligence — for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now we're saying that he is subject to criminal court in the United States. And you're confusing the people fighting this war.
By the way, the situation is actually even worse than Sen. Graham suggested. It's not just that bin Laden, if captured, would be entitled to Miranda warnings because he'd then be in custody (Miranda is required for all custodial interrogation in the U.S.). As Attorney General Holder noted, bin Laden has already been indicted (in 1998). Under American law, that means he is already an "accused" — the formal legal case against him has begun. If we are going to treat him like a civilian defendant with Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights, he has a right to counsel now — before we ever capture him.
Of course, KSM was also under indictment (since around 1996) when we captured him. But the Bush administration regarded that as irrelevant because KSM was an enemy combatant in wartime.
If, as Holder and Obama insist, we must adhere to the "rule of law" (a phrase they construe as "the rules and procedures of the civilian justice system"), we have to adhere to all of the "rule of law." If they are going to pick and choose which rules they're going to follow, how are they different from what they have spent years condemning?
On passage of a health-care bill in light of the differences between the House and Senate versions:
Well, it will depend on whether these numbers are anywhere near real. We just heard Harry Reid throw out a number, and I don't know where it came from, three-quarters of a trillion dollars he said are going to be saved as a result of this [Senate health-care bill]. I don't know where that came out of. If that holds up, I will eat my hat.
There are already loopholes that Mort talked about, the doctor fix, and there is something else. In the House bill, and I'm sure in the bill that we will hear about tomorrow in the Senate, it's ten years of people paying in, and six or seven years of health care [paying out] because [the benefits] kick in later.
So that is how you make the numbers look good. But annually it runs at a huge deficit.
On President Obama’s interview with Fox News’ Major Garrett:
Let me say how good it was to see the president sit down with Major. It constitutes the most important truce … since the Korean armistice in 1953, and I would say that we are South Korea …
[Present Obama] said "people" are warning us about a loss of confidence. He means the Chinese and the others whom he has been speaking with. Meaning that: He is a little bit wary about attacking the jobs issue with another huge stimulus because the people who buy our bonds, who he has been speaking with in Asia, are extremely nervous about that and are discouraging any attempt to blow up our debt on the jobs issue, also on health care and other [parts] of Obama's ambitious domestic agenda.
So it looks as if he wants to scale back. And in fact, the example he used, he mentioned earlier in the [Fox] interview, which we said: One thing we could do is to increase our exports to Asia by one percent, that would create a lot of jobs and it wouldn't be a drain on the treasury.
And that is so. But if he wants any progress on that, he's got to get [the] Chinese to … readjust their currency.
And on that he just got stiffed. … On Sunday, at the APEC summit, the Asian summit, the clause in the communique that called for a market-oriented currency exchange, which is code for raising the Chinese currency, was stopped and didn't enter the communique at all.
On Obama’s remarks to Garrett on Israeli settlement construction:
Well, he returned to his hard line again, in which he says that Israeli settlements are making it hard for a re-launch of the peace negotiations.
Apart from what anybody thinks about the virtue of settlement, the ideological import of it, look at the historical fact. For 16 years, in the absence of a freeze of settlements, there were negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. In fact, a year ago Abbas, the leader of the Palestinians, was deep in negotiations with the Israeli prime minister at a time when there was an increase in settlements.
So it was Obama who comes in. He calls for a settlement freeze. The Palestinians, of course, endorse it, and then say that unless Israel imposes a freeze, that there won't be any negotiations.
This was a self-inflicted wound on the part of the administration, completely unnecessary, and that's what has stopped the negotiations.
I have a mention of bowing in my column today — now, how would that subject have come up? — and have received a fair amount of related mail. Some of it is from Japan: where they know how to bow (as Obama does not). I mean, if you’re going to do it — certainly before the emperor — you might as well do it right. I thought I would publish one letter, not from Japan, but from Omaha, Neb.:
Dear Jay,
When I was 15, I went to an international Boy Scout jamboree that was held in Sweden. This was 1979. It was originally scheduled for Iran, but the shah got ousted and the organizers decided Sweden would be safer. Anyway, I was among a group of Scouts who were selected to meet Carl XVI Gustaf, the king of Sweden. Beforehand, we were told how to act: Don’t wear your hat, don’t shake hands unless he first extends his (he never did), and don’t bow. Why? Because we were not his subjects. We were frickin’ Boy Scouts and we didn’t bow to somebody else’s king. But I did enjoy meeting him. He was very nice and I appreciate that he came to meet us.
And if a Boy Scout did bow — which he wouldn’t, before a foreign king — he would be prepared.
I went to Yale. I live in SoCal. If it wasn't for NRO providing me with much needed sanity, I would probably throttle my friends and family. Thank you for preventing this aggression.
On Wednesday, Iran spurned a U.N.-brokered deal that would have sent its stockpile of low-enriched uranium out of the country. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells NRO that if the Obama administration continues with its “near religious faith in negotiations,” then Iran’s nuclear program will continue to be a threat.
“This is a graphic lesson for what is still a relatively new administration. Iran will not be talked out of their nuclear-weapons program,” says Bolton. “If President Obama is capable of learning from his experiences, then he would see that further negotiations with Iran are not going to produce results. This has been obvious for seven years, and Iran’s recent decision is just one more brick in the wall.”
President Obama said in Seoul earlier today that there will be now be “consequences” for Iran. The Associated Press reports that the U.N. Security Council’s permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia, and the U.S. — plus Germany will meet Friday in Brussels to discuss what measures can be taken.
“Our expectation is that over the next several weeks, we will be developing a package of potential steps we could take that will indicate our seriousness to Iran,” said Obama. “I continue to hold out the prospect that they may decide to walk through this door. I hope they do.”
Bolton says that Obama is missing the point. “We need to declare that we’re tired with negotiations,” says Bolton. “We need to be willing to ratchet up sanctions. But most importantly, we need to understand that there is no way to deal with nuclear weapons without regime change or force. The chances that the Obama administration understands this are not even between slim and zero — there’s simply no chance. They can’t see the reality of the situation.”
“I’ve always though that the (proposed U.N. deal) was a distraction from the real issue,” says Bolton. “The real issue with Iran has always been its uranium enrichment, not where it is shipped. This decision just takes us back to where we were before talks of a deal got started.”
We should expect “very little” to come out of the meeting in Brussels, adds Bolton. “Iran has done what it needed to do. The inspectors did not find centrifuges, so the board of the IAEA is not likely to do anything with incomplete evidence.”
I don’t really want to shut him up. I want him to change. Take those enormous talents and make all the arguments that he can legitimately make. Keep the cutesy gimmicks (I understand that we’re talking entertainment here), but have an iceberg of evidence beneath the surface. Fox is making so much money from the show that it can afford the staff to do the homework.
Absent that change, and I’m not holding my breath, let me suggest to my colleagues who want a better public policy debate that we’ve got to avoid the if-I-were-God fallacy. It’s not in our power to decide whether Glenn Beck’s show continues. He will save the Republic or fail to save it whatever we do. All we can do is be honest about what we think. I’ll go first. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. What Beck does is propaganda. Maybe propaganda has its place, but let’s not kid ourselves. Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are brothers.
The American Version of the French 35-Hour Workweek Model [Veronique de Rugy]
Back in the '90s, the French government thought it would be great idea to force employees to work fewer hours each week (with no salary reduction) so that employers would have to hire more people. The idea was basically to use two people to do the job of one in order to reduce unemployment in the country.
While this model hasn't worked as well as the French government hoped it would (see this paper, for instance), the Democrats are thinking that it would be great idea to spend roughly $600 million and try this in the U.S.
Senate Democrats crafting a job creation bill are considering a proposal to give money to workers who cut their hours in order to avoid layoffs.
A bill sponsored by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) would give unemployment compensation to employees who accept a reduced work schedule to allow their companies to avert layoffs or to hire more employees. Reed's proposal for work-sharing was mentioned during the Senate Democrats' lunch Tuesday, when Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) announced that an initiative focusing on jobs would soon be a priority, Reed's office said.
Democratic Sens. John Kerry (Mass.), Paul Kirk (Mass.) and Patrick Leahy (Vt.) have signed on as co-sponsors.
I am not even sure where to start. How can these guys think that making employees more expensive, rather than less, is going to help create jobs? This model increases the cost of labor and reduces the incentives for employers to hire people without subsidies. Also, what ends up happening, as we saw in France, is that employers don’t hire more people — employees' work hours are reduced, but their workloads aren’t. It increases the stress of employees in the workplace and leads to the use of more sick days. Finally, employees see their salaries frozen to compensate for the increase in labor costs. Overall, it is a terrible idea.
If the U.S. captures Osama bin Laden, there's no need to interrogate him, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Thursday.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the chairman of that committee, said that arguments raised by Republican senators about whether bin Laden would be afforded Miranda rights if he were captured was a "red herring."
"The red herring that my friend [Sen.] Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was covering is not realistic," Leahy said during an appearance on "Washington Journal" on C-SPAN.
"For one thing, capturing Osama bin Laden — we've had enough on him, we don't need to interrogate him," Leahy added.
The report CBO provided late last night has some interesting information. For example:
The cost curve goes UP
— “Under the legislation, federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010–2019 period, as would the federal budgetary commitment to health care.” (page 6)
Deficit reduction?
— While Democrats will point to $127 billion in possible deficit reduction, that is made possible in part by delaying the benefits until the fifth year of the 10-year budget window. And even then, the $127 billion is LESS than the deficit that was already spent in October of this year. In other words, any possible savings over 10 years of this bill are already erased by the deficit spending of last month alone.
— And remember, CBO predicts that the 2019 deficit will be $722 billion. So their projected deficit reduction, as uncertain as it is, over the second 10 years won’t erase even the 10th year’s deficit.
Delayed costs
— To make costs appear smaller, major provisions of the plan are pushed back an additional year—to 2014
“Starting in 2014, the legislation would…” (page 4)
Government plan would have higher premiums
— “CBO’s assessment is that a public plan paying negotiated rates would attract a broad network of providers but would typically have premiums that were somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges.” (page 9)
Effect of the Medicare cuts
— “Whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care is unclear.” (Page 17)
The basics
— Spending:The actual spending in the bill is $1.2 trillion and the cost of the bill is $2.5 trillion over 10 years of full implementation (2014-2023).
— Taxes Increases: Taxes will go up $493.6 billion—nearly half a trillion dollars.
I’m in India right now and the top headline of the “Times of India” while Obama was in China was: “Obama wants Beijing to police South Asia”. Obama probably said something that to him was a throwaway line about China helping resolve the Pakistan situation, but it didn’t look like a throwaway line from here.
The increasingly versatile Robert Costa makes his debut as a podcast interviewer as we discuss my new novel, The First Assassin. We talk about the plot, what Washington was like in 1861, how I named one of the characters after a Metro stop on the blue line, and much more.
At Big Hollywood, I describe how the movies helped me write The First Assassin.
On HeyMiller.com (my website), I've posted reactions from some of the first people to finish the book.
Finally, according to this, I am #3 on a list of "conservative and libertarian novelists of the future."
Ten Percent of Jobs on Recovery.gov Were Not Created by Stimulus [Veronique de Rugy]
According to a new report, nearly one out of ten jobs on the website Recovery.gov have nothing to do with the stimulus funding. The Government Accountability Office's new report shows that as many as 4,000 potential recipients of stimulus funds reported creating 58,000, though they had not yet received any money. What's more, some 9,200 recipients reported receiving a total of $965 million, yet didn't have any jobs to show for that money.
In fact, Earl Devaney, the guy in charge of monitoring how the stimulus dollars are spent, declared to ABC News that he couldn't guarantee any of the jobs reported on the website. Not even one?
Interestingly, Joe Biden has been making a big push lately to convince people that there have been no reports of widespread misuse of stimulus funding (obviously, the VP doesn't read the Corner). Yet, according to the Washington Post this morning, "GAO is pursuing at least eight allegations of waste or abuse of stimulus funds from more than 100 reported. The audit agency has referred at least 33 other allegations to federal inspectors general, according to the report."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has finally released the text of his version of the Democrats’ health care bill. The roughly 2,000 page bill is a monstrosity, pure and simple.
It is fiscal madness, for one thing. CBO’s 10-year projection scores its cost at $848 billion, since CBO is required to use a 10-year window that starts at enactment and the bill is designed to start collecting taxes well before it starts spending money. If you look at the first 10 years of actual implementation, when both the spending and the taxes are in effect, the 10-year cost is $2.5 trillion. The Democrats are proudly pointing to the fact that even with its high cost the CBO says the bill will not increase the deficit in the first ten years, but what that actually means is that in the midst of an economic downturn it raises taxes (and also cuts Medicare for the elderly) enough to cover the gargantuan cost. In fact it raises taxes by almost half a trillion dollars over ten years (including taxes on employers, on the uninsured themselves, and on drugs and medical devices and more), and cuts Medicare by nearly as much. And of course, the deficit neutrality calculation assumes things that will never happen (which, as usual, the CBO does its best to signal to readers of its analysis of the bill, even if it cannot say it outright.) It is based, for instance, on the bill’s claim that some key Medicare physician payments would be cut by 23% in 2011 and would not be restored—which will happen well after hell freezes over.
As the CBO carefully puts it: “The legislation would put into effect a number of procedures that might be difficult to maintain over a long period of time,” and “the long-term budgetary impact could be quite different if key provisions of the bill were ultimately changed or not fully implemented.” This is Washington-speak for “someone is holding a gun to my head.”
Meanwhile, the bill would do basically nothing to address the actual problem at the heart of our health care woes: rising costs. It would bend the government’s health care cost curve up, not down, and it contains all the ingredients that the other Democratic bills have contained for an increase in the cost of private health insurance premiums.
It also does not include the abortion language that was in the House bill to prevent public funding of abortion coverage, which will (or at least should) be a problem for Senator Ben Nelson and perhaps a few other Democrats (let alone for any eventual conference committee). And it does include a public option (which will be a problem for Senator Lieberman and a few others). And of course it consists of a fundamentally unwise approach to financing health care coverage.
So, to sum up: the idea is to spend trillions even as our debt is mounting, inflict massive tax increases on a troubled economy, impose costly mandates on employers as unemployment hovers above 10%, squeeze money out of Medicare not to fix the program’s finances but to create a whole new enormous federal entitlement alongside it, insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients, and cause millions of middle-class families to lose the employer-based insurance they have today, pay even higher premiums, and find themselves herded toward a government insurance provider. Oh, and at the end of it all, if we use the methods of counting the uninsured favored by the Democrats, there are still 24 million people without health insurance.
President Obama in South Korea yesterday: "Iran has taken weeks now and has not shown its willingness to say yes to this proposal . . . and so as a consequence we have begun discussions with our international partners about the importance of having consequences."
So there we have it: Iran now is threatened with a lecture by the international community about the importance of the consequences that it might face. And pretty soon Mr. Obama and "our international partners" will consider the possibility of weighing the option of exploring the alternative of choosing among packages of consequences. I'm sleeping better already. — Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
A note on that "ecstatic communal dancing" that was such a feature of the hunter-gatherer ur-religion, and that I predicted might make a comeback in the religion of the future. Razib reminds us in his review that such dancing was regarded as a threat to order when urban societies came up, and largely disappeared from religious ceremonies. The very constrained, bourgeois societies of the European industrial age separated it from religion altogether and tamed it down into the stateley minuets you see in TV period dramas. When the real thing wells up, sensible people bolt their doors. So perhaps it can't be allowed in any society organized on a large scale. We're stuck with Dancing with the Stars.
Contrasting Obama's and Reagan's Speeches about Freedom [Veronique de Rugy]
Cato Institute's VP David Boaz has this interesting post comparing Obama's and Reagan’s definitions of freedom. The analysis — based on President Obama's speech to Chinese college students on Monday and Pres. Ronald Reagan's speech to Moscow State University students in 1988 — reveals some striking differences.
Obama, Boaz writes, gave an eloquent defense of freedom, and in particular "freedoms of expression and worship — of access to information and political participation," which he identifies as core American and universal values. Yet the president leaves out "freedom of enterprise, property rights, and limited government as American values. Those are not only the necessary conditions for growth and prosperity, they are the necessary foundation for civil liberties."
In other words, he doesn't truly get what freedom is about.
How Hard Can AG Holder Have Studied The KSM Question? [Andy McCarthy]
Attorney General Holder's exchange with Senator Lindsey Graham yesterday has, quite appropriately, gotten lots of attention. I want to drill down for a moment, though, on one element of it. The lawyer's stock in trade is precedent. Whether you're a prosecutor or any other lawyer faced with a policy question, the first thing you want to know is what the law says on the subject: Has this come up before? Are there prior cases on point? What have the courts had to say? Those are the first-order questions — always.
Here's the relevant transcript:
SEN. GRAHAM: Yeah, nor do I. But here's my concern. Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?
ATTY GEN. HOLDER: [ACM: LONG PAUSE] I don't know. I'd have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I've made —
SEN. GRAHAM: We're making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I'll answer it for you. The answer is no.
ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Well, I think —
SEN. GRAHAM: ... The Ghailani case — he was indicted for the Cole bombing before 9/11. And I didn't object to it going into federal court. But I'm telling you right now. We're making history and we're making bad history.
How could Holder possibly not know the answer to this fundamental question — how could he, in fact, be stumped by it. If he studied and agonized over this decision as he says he did, this would have been the first issue he'd have considered: the fact that there was no legal precedent for what he wanted to do. Or, put another way, if there was a single case that supported Holder's decision, it would have been the only case we'd have been hearing about — from DOJ, the academy, and the media — for the last ten months.
Of course, if, as I've suggested, this is a political decision rather than a legal one, it would make perfect sense that the Attorney General wasn't up to speed on legal precedent. The law isn't what's driving this train.
I've been reading the Corner for a few years now — I find that you fill the intellectual gap created by today's media. I find most journalists today don't answer the basic who, what, why, and when, and it leaves me wanting. Thanks for helping a guy get up to speed.
"Death Panels" is an emotional term (to put it mildly) that, as a practical matter, is not necessarily inaccurate. Here are two stories from right-of-center British newspapers (the Daily Mail is the more tabloidy of the two) about the prescribing (or not) of one drug (sorafenib and Nexavar are the same compound) that show some of the issues involved in the way that the British system actually works.
Liver cancer sufferers are being condemned to an early death by being denied a new drug on the Health Service, campaigners warn. They criticised draft guidance that will effectively ban the drug sorafenib - which is routinely used in every other country where it is licensed. Trials show the drug, which costs £36,000 a year, can increase survival by around six months for patients who have run out of options. The Government's rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) said the overall cost was 'simply too high' to justify the 'benefit to patients'....
Nice had claimed it was approving more drugs under End of Life policies introduced in January meant to benefit small numbers of terminally ill people.So far two drugs have been approved for three cancers. But two drugs have been banned under the rules, with a ban pending on three further drugs including sorafenib...It is three years since Ann Marie Rogers won her famous court victory which forced the Health Service to give her - and other breast cancer victims - access to the wonder drug Herceptin. The drug had been turned down by rationing watchdog Nice but Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt told trusts that they could not deny the drug on grounds of costs. Now another group of cancer sufferers are facing a similar battle but it is unlikely that we will see Andy Burnham, the current Health Secretary, taking a similar stance —because this time the drug that has been turned down, Nexavar, is one that helps against liver cancer. The problem for campaigners is that liver cancer is not as high profile as breast cancer. This is partly down to the fact that fewer people get cancer of the liver than are diagnosed with breast cancer - around 3,000 a year compared with 45,000. But that is not the whole story. Breast cancer has two charities fighting its corner - Breakthrough Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Care - both of which attract millions of pounds in donations, and help boost the profile. Other cancers tend to fade into the background. There is, for example, still no prostate cancer screening programme that compares to the major screening programme for breast cancer.
For patients with advanced liver cancer the decision made by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) not to approve a drug that may extend their lives is a bitter blow. They and their families will feel like their last hope has been pulled out from beneath their feet. But the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence has to make dispassionate decisions for the good of all NHS patients. The painful truth is that Nexavar is an expensive drug that extends life by, on average, less than three months. It is not a cure and these patients will still die from their cancer. Data submitted to Nice shows that supplying the drug to the 600 to 700 people with advanced liver cancer would cost a total of £7.7m.
That would give those people the chance of an extra precious few months and admittedly some have lived for six months or longer on Nexavar. But the data shows that the median survival benefit is 2.8 months, and that means that for those who may gain six months, some will gain a lot less or nothing at all. Nice has decided that the £7.7m would be better spent elsewhere in the NHS, that could be on other cancer treatments, or heart transplants, on intensive care facilties for premature babies, or hip replacements. This will be of no comfort to those with liver cancer or their families but unless taxpayers are willing to increase their contribution to the health service, hard decisions like these will have to be taken.
Hard, horrible decisions, certainly. Then the ugly question comes: Who should take them? And on what basis? Note, too, the role that political clout (as indirectly represented in the Daily Mail story by the discussion of the influence of different cancer charities) has to play.
The nation's leading think tanks are continuing to produce critical information for challenging the growth of Big Government and promoting the advancement of liberty in America and throughout the world. Check out these recent releases.
• Writing for the Cato Institute, researchers from Cal State-Northridge and New York Presbyterian Hospital have a new study showing how and why America leads the world in medical innovation:
In general, Americans tend to receive more new treatments and pay more for them — a fact that is usually regarded as a fault of the American system. That interpretation, if not entirely wrong, is at least incomplete. Rapid adoption and extensive use of new treatments and technologies create an incentive to develop those techniques in the first place. When the United States subsidizes medical innovation, the whole world benefits. That is a virtue of the American system that is not reflected in comparative life expectancy and mortality statistics.
• The Heritage Foundation’s indispensable Robert Rector and two of his colleagues have just produced their latest summary of federal welfare spending. Years ago, Rector exploded the myth that only cash assistance to families with children was “welfare,” showing that Washington and the states spent hundreds of billions of dollars more on means-tested health benefits, day care, housing, and many other in-kind and cash programs strewn across dozens of agencies. For the 2008 fiscal year, the total welfare bill was $714 billion. Three-quarters came from the federal budget, the rest from the states.
An e-mailer makes a good point, in response to this:
In a recent post on NRO you offered some reasons that academics do not care for popular, narrative history, including ideology, a preference for jargon, and envy of popular writers' success.
I'm completing a dissertation in history, and I would point to another factor: professional historians are already familiar with the narrative that popular histories tell, at least in their given area of expertise. If you are a specialist in the American Revolution or early republic, there is little new to be learned from, say, McCulloch's biography of John Adams. Of course, popular histories don't claim to break new ground. They are intended for a different audience.
Also, academics want arguments rather than narratives, since the basic facts are often well known and it is what the facts mean that is in dispute.
I agree that ideology and prejudice play a role. I do a lot of narrative, and I'd like to do more. Popular histories can be great. But the structure of the discipline, I think, needs to be part of the explanation for why there's a divide between popular and academic works.
The last thing we need, of course, is every professional historian in the land thinking that he must retell the Battle of Gettysburg.
At the same time, it's worth asking what this scholarship is really worth. I don't want to knock the importance of original research into obscure subjects, but I also suspect that the quality of a lot of this work is quite low—and that broadly speaking, we'd be better served if more professors performed less scholarship and did more teaching. Mark Bauerlein of Emory has addressed this question in an excellent paper for AEI (pdf here).
It's hard to when you're making it up as you go along.
In yesterday's exchange with Senator Kyl, while giving the back of the hand to my claim that leftist lawyers had derailed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Attorney General Eric "Real American Values" Holder argued that it was the Supreme Court — "not, I think, a group of leftist lawyers" — who had "had concerns" about the way the military commissions "were constructed." Of course, it wasn't the full Supreme Court that had "concerns" in the 2006 Hamdan case — it was Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg and Breyer (i.e., the Court's leftist bloc), joined by Justice Kennedy (who tends to vault left when the issue is whether the judiciary can impose new restraints on executive power). Hamdan was represented by Neal Katyal, now the Deputy Solicitor General in the Obama Justice Department. Katyal, who is a very able lawyer, began his legal career clerking for Justice Breyer, after a stint clerking on the Second Circuit for Judge Guido Calabresi, one of the most left-wing jurists in the U.S. And here's a rundown of the numerous legal briefs filed in the case. You can judge for yourself whether I accurately described the major opposition to the MCA as leftist lawyers.
But here's the thing. Yesterday, the AG went on to say that after Hamdan was decided in June 2006, "The Congress reenacted — and, I think, appropriately so — the way in which the commissions were constructed." (Emphasis added.) But he didn't "think" it was "appropriately so" at the time. As I've argued, the ink was not yet dry on the MCA when the detainees (several of whom have been represented by Holder's old firm and by other Obama DOJ lawyers) marched en masse into federal court to challenge the MCA as unconstitutional. And in June 2008, speaking as an Obama campaign adviser at the left-leaning American Constitution Society, Holder inveighed that the Bush administration had "secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution."
Now that he's actually had his Department endorse many of the policies he then condemned, I wonder if the Attorney General would agree that his June '08 speech was a tad polemical?
Got a neat and informative note from the Midwest, responding to something in Impromptus today. I have an item about legitimate federal spending and less legitimate federal spending. American wars are clearly a federal responsibility. So, if we are going to wage them, we must spend money on them. But what about the millions of other things the feds try to do, regardless of what the Constitution says? In my item, I mention a line of WFB’s: that the government will spend money on “free false teeth or whatever.” That is one of my favorite lines of all time, and you can perhaps still hear the tone with which WFB said it: “free false teeth.”
Well, here is that note from a reader:
Hi Jay,
I live in Central Wisconsin and within the next few weeks they will be breaking ground on a new federally qualified dental-health-care center. Among many other things they will provide are essentially free false teeth! Apparently they received some stimulus money from the “venerable” Dave Obey [a congressman]. Funny how it’s considered gov’t money and not taxpayer dollars.
Yeah, funny. And, as always: Be careful what you joke about. Free false teeth, come true!
I always enjoy reading The Corner, and the other content at NRO. You manage to provide a sane perspective on events, along with a bit of fun to keep things from seeming too dire. Best of luck with the fundraising!
A Labor Strike in the Emerald Isle [Michael Warren]
Galway, Ireland — Civil servants in the Republic of Ireland are planning a one-day strike across the country to protest the government’s plan to cut their salaries. From the Irish Times:
Senior civil servants have voted to join the planned national public sector strike scheduled for next Tuesday, November 24th.
In what is seen as a hardening of attitudes, members of the Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants (AHCPS), which represents principal officers and assistant principal officers as well as other grades such as prison governors and court registrars, yesterday voted by 60 per cent to 40 per cent to take part.
The move represents an effective reversal of a decision taken by the union last March when members voted by a similar margin not to participate in industrial action planned at that stage.
The strike includes, as I found out in class yesterday, university faculty at all of Ireland’s public universities. Here at the National University of Ireland in Galway, practically all of our November 24 classes are cancelled. There are even rumors that the library will be closed, which practically renders that day useless for working on final papers. The faculty is well organized, but their union did not make this decision unanimously. One of my lecturers, a union member who hinted in class that she might be against the strike, said that a good one-third of the union voted against the strike.
In fact, the one-day “strike” is more a symbolic protest than a call to action, and I doubt it will do much good. Ireland’s economy is in a pretty bad state, and tax revenues are down by 17 percent. The strike is receiving hardly any newspaper coverage, which may reflect a general feeling that it will be ineffective. But regardless of the strike’s success, it will cause a huge work stoppage.
This situation has given me a newfound appreciation for the relative weakness of organized labor in the United States. Even with their preferred candidate in the White House, unions still aren’t as powerful in America as they are in Western Europe. When they have to resort to physically attacking their political opponents, it’s an indication that they don’t have us by the collar.
— Michael Warren, a former Collegiate Network intern at National Review, studies economics and history at Vanderbilt University and blogs at Vandy Right.
I'm a pastor without a lot of money, so this is what I can give. But I so truly appreciate the wisdom you have amassed at NRO. You're a gift to us all and to America specifically. I laugh at the witty pointedness of Steyn, laugh hard in fact, and always glean from Goldberg, McCarthy, and such. You guys are gold. Keep up the good fight!
When I first came to Washington in the early 1990s, I was eager to read a definitive book on Reagan and his presidency. I had grown up watching Reagan and broadly admired him, but I wanted to go into the weeds and get a handle on the tax bills, the MX missile controversy, Bitburg—all of it. So I asked for suggestions. The bottom line is that the book I wanted to read didn't exist.
Since then, many people have written excellent books on Reagan: Cannon, D'Souza, Kengor, O'Sullivan, etc. Yet the very best—the one that takes the most comprehensive look at both foreign and domestic policy and smartly contextualizes all of it—is Steve Hayward's two-volume work of political history, The Age of Reagan. The first volume covers Reagan's pre-presidential years; the second volume, which came out this summer, covers the 1980s. This is the book I would have liked to read 15 years ago.
Andrew Sullivan: The Randall Terry of Anti-Palinism . . . [Mike Potemra]
. . . or the Inspector Javert?
According to this CNN poll, only 28 percent of Americans believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be president. For a person as well known to the public as Palin, that is an appallingly low number. For someone who is already so firmly fixed in the national consciousness – more: who has already reached a stratospheric level of celebrity — where is the room for growth in popularity? Who are the people who could possibly move from the 70-odd percent who declare Palin unqualified, into the 30-odd percent who believe she is qualified?
The answer is: people who become convinced that her current low public image is largely the result of unfair depictions of her in the media. I have little patience for victimology, specifically the self-pity of politicians who whine that they are being unfairly maligned by a dastardly media (conservatives who complain about the MSM, liberals who complain about Fox). I suspect that most Americans, who have an even lower opinion of politicians in general than I do, agree with me on this. So if the former governor of Alaska goes out and makes this assertion of unfairness, that in itself will not convince many people. Indeed, it would more probably backfire, with the typical citizen responding, “Geez. Self-absorbed much?”
But: If prominent media figures show an obsession with Palin that is so deep that they put the rest of the world on hold just because she wrote a book — then people might start suspecting that, yes, maybe there really is some animus in media elites, and maybe we should give Palin another chance. That’s when the 70-some percent starts to melt away, and a Palin presidency becomes conceivable. The second step, from “conceivable” to “likely,” is an even shorter step than the first.
Andrew Sullivan is, on many issues, an interesting writer. But when it comes to this hobby-horse, it wouldn’t even be accurate to say that he has let Sarah Palin jiu-jitsu him; no, what’s happening here is that he is jiu-jitsuing himself — an act of which Sarah Palin is the most conspicuous beneficiary.
I’ve never met Palin, but people who have tell me she is an intelligent and talented woman. She’ll have a interesting and happy future in whatever line of work she ends up in — but if she chooses presidential politics, she will succeed only if she can count on some help from her enemies. So far, she’s getting it.
The Daily Telegraph reports on the horse-trading for the job of the EU's "president" (technically he or she will preside over the EU's council):
European leaders are heading for a fierce battle on Thursday after Germany and France were accused of plotting to bounce their favoured federalist candidate into the post of EU president. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were revealed to have made a pact to railroad Herman Van Rompuy, Belgium's Prime Minister, into the powerful Brussels job created by the Lisbon Treaty. The attempted "stitch-up" angered Britain, Spain, Italy and Poland along with other central and east European countries…The last Franco-German attempt to impose a candidate for a top EU job failed in 2004 when Guy Verhofstadt, the then Belgium prime minister, was vetoed by Britain for the post of European Commission President. Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, has called for the EU appointments process to "be as transparent and democratic as possible", using words that were seen as coded criticism of Europe's two biggest and most powerful countries. A senior diplomatic source described the mood among southern, central and East European EU countries as "angry" amid preparations for a summit that many officials and diplomats fear will be chaotic and unpredictable.
FPOD: Not Scared of KSM . . . and Not Worried about McCarthy! [Andy McCarthy]
From today's hearing:
SEN. KYL: Let me just close with this point. You said — and this really bothers me, Mr. Attorney General, with all due respect — "For eight years, justice has been delayed for the victims of the 9/11 attacks." I want to put in the record, Mr. Chairman — ask unanimous consent to insert in the record an article called "Justice Delayed" by Andrew McCarthy.
SEN. LEAHY: Without objection.
SEN. KYL: And I'll just quote two paragraphs from this.
"This is chutzpah writ large," he writes. "The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers to derail military tribunals by challenge (sic/challenging) them in the courts. Many of those lawyers are now working for the Obama Justice Department. That includes Holder, whose firm, Covington & Burling, volunteered its services" —
ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Hah!
SEN. KYL: — "to at least 18 of America's enemies in lawsuits they brought against the American people."
And it concludes, "Within two years, KSM and four fellow war criminals stood ready to plead guilty and proceed to execution. But then the Obama administration blew into Washington. Want to talk about delay? Obama shut down the commission, despite the jihadists' efforts to conclude it by pleading guilty. Obama's team permitted no movement of (sic/on) the case for 11 months, and now has torpedoed a perfectly valid commission case — despite keeping the commission system for other cases — so that we can instead endure an incredibly expensive and burdensome civil (sic/civilian) trial that will take years to complete."
The witness can surely respond to what I said.
ATTY GEN. HOLDER: I don't even know where to begin — other than to say that, you know, this notion of leftist lawyers somehow prolonging this: The vast majority of the time in which these matters were not brought to trial, to fruition, happened in the prior administration. The Supreme Court — not, I think, a group of leftist lawyers — had concerns about the way in which some of the commissions were — the way in which the commissions were constructed.
The Congress reenacted — and, I think, appropriately so — the way in which the commissions were constructed. This is not a Congress peopled only with leftist lawyers, as Mr. McCarthy would say. So, you know, that makes for nice rhetoric and it makes for, you know, good, I guess, fodder on the talk shows and all of that stuff, you know, but I'm here to talk about facts and evidence, real American values, and not the kinds of polemics that he seems prone to — seems prone to. So, you know, that's — I'm not worried about Mr. McCarthy.
As I noted in addressing Attorney General Eric Holder's testimony this morning, the heart of his defense of the administration's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 terrorists in civilian court is the howler that there is no real difference between a civilian trial and a military commission.
Holder absurdly claimed that he believed it would be easier to get a conviction in civilian court — notwithstanding that the more lax evidentiary standards in military commissions make it easier for the government to get its proof admitted. And that's beside the fact that the jihadists wanted to plead guilty and proceed to execution in their military commission. (In Holder-world, conviction in an unpredictable civilian trial two years from now is somehow a surer thing than a military commission in which the defendants asked to plead guilty eleven months ago.)
Holder also claimed that there was no real difference between the protection of classified information in civilian and military courts. I explained in the aforementioned post why this isn't true. But I neglected to mention the most obvious reason why it isn't true: the Justice Department's own "protocols" for sorting out which enemy combatants get military commissions and which get civilan trials with all the rights and privileges of American citizens.
During today's testimony, Holder was especially incoherent in trying to explain the rationale — which has resulted in the worst war criminals getting a civilian trial while lesser war criminals are stuck in military tribunals. He kept falling back on DOJ's newly developed "protocols" for making this judgment. Scott Johnson has an excellent post at Powerline discussing these protocols. There are only three and they are very elastic. But for now, I want to focus on the second one (my italics):
B. Efficiency. The factors to be considered here are protection of intelligence sources and methods; the venue in which the case would be tried; issues related to multiple-defendant trials; foreign policy concerns; legal or evidentiary problems that might attend prosecution in the other jurisdiction: and efficiency and resource concerns.
So here are a couple of questions the Judiciary Committee might want to ask Holder in its follow-up:
1. If, as between civilian trials and military commissions, there is no real difference in the degree to which national defense secrets are protected, why does the Justice Department apply a protocol which asserts that the "protection of intelligence sources and methods" will be different in the two systems?
2. If the evidentiary rules in the two systems are virtual mirror images, why does DOJ apply a protocol that says evidence that is admissible in one system may not be admissible in the other? And, since Holder claims the government has an easier time proving its case in civilian court, can he identify a single category of evidence that is admissible in civilian court but not in a military tribunal?
On number 2, here's a hint: One of the major attacks on the military commissions, advanced by lawyers like those in Holder's firm who volunteered their services to the enemy, was that military commissions permitted too much hearsay and, potentially, evidence obtained by "torture." They argued that the government should be required to prove its case under what they insisted were the more demanding standards that govern civilian trials.
Coping with the fact of Japan's aging (and ultimately shrinking) population will not be without its difficulties (exacerbated in Japan's case by its massive debt overhang), but ultimately it's an opportunity, not a crisis, and the Japanese have done well to recognize that mass immigration, a "solution" that causes more problems than it solves, is not a sensible alternative. Managing this demographic transition will instead have to be a matter of longer working lives and increased productivity. So far as the latter is concerned, step forward Saya.
In an attempt to make it easier to deal with Tokyo’s masses of shoppers, department store Takashimaya decided to enroll the services of a speech-recognising robot for a week...Saya was developed by Hiroshi Kobayashi of the Tokyo University of Science in 2004 and had up until recently been involved in a trial at a Tokyo primary school. The robot supply teacher was capable of catching students passing notes and copying homework as well as giving them a rather stern telling off. Saya then began "working" at Takashimaya in Ginza where she sits at the store's information desk. For a week in October shoppers were treated to a very different kind of store assistant. Saya is capable of responding to shoppers’ questions and complaints in more than 700 different ways, directing them to the relevant floors and making small talk in between. It may just be my Japanese accent but Saya seemed rather confused by my simple questions, often directing me to the toilet regardless of where I had asked to go.
Either that Hunter — or she was telling the gaijin to p*** off . . .
Fans of the greatest sci-fi movie ever made (Blade Runner, in case there can be any doubt over the matter) will relish this:
The scary thing about Saya is her virtual past. Programmers have installed responses that allow her to tell passers by a little about her history. Saya can respond to questions about previous jobs...
While I am a faithful subscriber to NRODT, I have benefitted from your incredible work at NRO for far too long without any sacrifice from me. This is chump change compared to what I wish I could give, and I hope someday to give much more. That is how important I think your work is. Thanks!
One of the best gifts I ever received from my parents was a subscription to the National Review. Since 1999, I've been an avid follower both in print and online. NRO is one of the *go to* sites I visit every morning. Keep up the great work — we NEED you more than ever!
Bad day for Recovery.gov. First, Earl Devaney, the chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, had to inform Rep. Darrell Issa that "the board can’t vouch for the numbers submitted by recipients of stimulus funding."
Now, Ed Pound, director of communications for Recovery.gov, has stepped in it too. When asked to explain the phenomenon of stimulus-related job creation in non-existent congressional districts, Pound told the New Orleans Times-Picayune, "who knows, man, who really knows."
Totally. In what sense are congressional districts "real," anyway, you know? It kind of blows your mind, if you think about it.
