BMBS

MSNBC today published a “white paper” by the Department of Justice — undated by clearly written during the Obama Administration — providing the legal framework for U.S. drones to kill U.S. citizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activity.  (Click here to see it.)   The document asserts that it would be lawful to kill a United States citizen if “an informed, high-level official” of the government decided that the target was a ranking figure in Al Qaeda who posed “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States” and if his capture was not feasible.

That’s screaming out for some parsing.  Which “informed, high-level official”?  Based on whose information?  Who vets the information and is so confident of it to sentence a man or woman to death without trial, defense, judge or jury?  Who determines “imminent threat”?  And who determines that capture is not feasible?

Surely there’s got to be a way to get closer to our values on something like this.

Major papers report today that the Democratic Party — asleep at the switch while the Republicans cooked up ways to block voter access to polls — is now going to fight back.   Several studies show that laws passed by Republican-dominated state legislatures succeeded in keeping hundreds of thousands of voters, mostly elderly and minorities who tend to vote Democratic, away from the polls.   Lines created by the Republican “reforms” caused delays in urban areas lasting several hours.  MIT researchers have determined that blacks and Hispanics waited nearly twice as long in line to vote on average than whites.  An Ohio State University professor and The Orlando Sentinel, concluded that more than 200,000 voters in Florida (surprise!!!!) “gave up in frustration” without voting.

Democrats in the House and Senate have already introduced bills that would require states to provide online voter registration and allow at least 15 days of early voting, among other things.  We’ll see, won’t we?

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday (April 2) ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband.

Speaking for the four dissenters, Justice Breyer said that the Fourth Amendment should be understood to bar strip-searches of people arrested for minor offenses not involving drugs or violence, unless officials had a reasonable suspicion that they were carrying contraband.

Justice Kennedy, who supported the decision, wrote that about 13 million people are admitted each year to the nation’s jails.

Many Americans tend to look down our noses at younger democracies like Poland.  But news reports this week indicate that, in at least some ways, Warsaw is ahead of us.

Polish newspapers report that the former head of Poland’s intelligence service has been charged with aiding the Central Intelligence Agency in setting up a secret prison to detain suspected members of Al Qaeda.   The Gazeta Wyborcza said that Zbigniew Siemiatkowski faces charges of violating international law by “unlawfully depriving prisoners of their liberty,” in connection with the secret C.I.A. prison where Qaeda suspects were subjected to brutal interrogation methods.

As the New York Times has pointed out, when President Obama took office in 2009, he said he wanted to “look forward, as opposed to looking backward” and rejected calls for a broad investigation of C.I.A. interrogations and other Bush administration counterterrorism programs.

New data make it crystal clear:  The rich do get richer.

In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.

In the same year, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.

So yes, someone is benefiting from the growth.

In a recent review about the TV series Portlandia, New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot gave a great definition of what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.”  She called it “the need to distinguish oneself by minute shadings and to insist, with outsized militancy, on the importance of those shadings.”

Freud’s examples were of countries and nations, but it sure fits for a lot of individuals too.

My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility. We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common—often wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.

– Les Gelb
President Emeritus
Council on Foreign Relations
in an article entitled Mission Unaccomplished
Summer 2009

Wow.

A professor and leading expert on hereditary diseases won a prestigious award.  At the award ceremony, she wore a long-sleeve top and a long skirt to appease the conservative acting health minister.  She was not allowed to sit with her husband; men and women were segregated at the event.  She was instructed that a male colleague would have to accept the award for her because women were not permitted on stage.

Which country is this?  (Answer below.)
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In today’s New York Times, columnist David Brooks wonders why, if “liberals” have so much “cultural power,” why are they so weak politically.  Brooks posits that two perceptions are responsible: a) that “liberals” believe in the federal government, and b) that the federal government is not trustworthy or effective.

Brooks says:  “Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It’s more likely because they think the whole system is rigged. Or to put it in the economists’ language, they believe the government has been captured by rent-seekers.  This is the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places.”  Interestingly, Brooks concedes that “Some of these rent-seeking groups are corporate types.”

Making things worse for the Dems themselves, Brooks notes: “In an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn’t you?”

All good questions.

In North Carolina’s eugenics program from 1929 to 1974, the state had one of the most aggressive programs to sterilize people to reduce welfare costs and cleanse the gene pool.  In North Carolina alone, about 7,600 people were sterlized.

A task force charged with determining appropriate compensation produced its figure today:  $50,000.

California sterilized at least 20,000 people.