Radley Balko defends the Cato Institute

So: as for this. I can’t and don’t speak for anyone else here, so these thoughts are only mine.

Let me just say a few things to Mr. Balko.

• Nowhere on the poll or post was there any indication that it was private, only for the regular readership of that blog, or in any other way intended for a limited response.


• People voted on an Internet poll that has, at best, an entirely tangential relationship to police violence and civil liberties. From Balko’s self-aggrandizing, aggrieved post, you’d think the Balloon Juice community had personally participated in police misconduct. Settle down.


• I don’t know why libertarianism tends to attract that particular kind of Internet tough guy, the deeply sensitive Internet tough guy. Balko likes to engage with both barrels, and then turns around and pouts when people treat him similarly. Preemptive complaining about the rebuttals you think you’re going to receive are always an indication of a weak stance, incidentally.


• Allow me to introduce you to my friend, the Internet. The Internet is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Asking the Internet to play fair and nice is to demonstrate that you don’t understand the Internet. If I posted a poll on Balloon Juice and said “now please only regular Balloon Juice commenters vote,” and the cretins from Reason started voting, would Balko shed any tears for me? Of course not.


• Police misconduct is an extremely important issue. Even a cursory glance at this blog’s history will inform you that it is taken seriously here. How best to serve that cause is, as most are, debatable. It’s true: I, and presumably others here, doubt that the Cato Institute does have or will have a positive impact on the cause of preventing police misconduct. Character is important and Cato doesn’t have any that can’t be bought, or pushed out the door if it treads to far from Republican politics. It is frankly inarguable that Cato’s political presence benefits authoritarian conservative politicians whose reactionary policies keep the victims of political misconduct in a state of material and political powerlessness. That’s a fact. And that was true before corporate oligarchs with no track record of interest in stopping  police misconduct undertook an effort to squash whatever vestiges of evenhandedness existed at the think tank. Sorry: just because you say your buddies want to help doesn’t mean that they do, or that they can, or that they will. Balko’s whole complaint is based on a juvenile vision of the politics of personality: I think these are good dudes, so therefore they will do good deeds.


• One of the best, most certain ways to help those who are frequently the subject of police misconduct is to remove them from the poverty and political dispossession that makes police misconduct against them possible. That is an effort that both Balko and the Cato Institute have worked tirelessly to oppose. If he’d like, Balko is perfectly able to ask what the preferred policies are of the poor black and Hispanic people who are most likely to be the victims of police misconduct and police violence. In large percentages, they favor a redistributive social policy that he abhors. If he bothered to ask them, he might even be compelled to ask why the people he purports to speak for have such little interest in his politics.

Hey, look: no snark or tired Internet cliches. Just somebody who disagrees.

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The sport of kings, the old queen’s heart

I wrote about this earlier, but if you haven’t yet, take a look at the video of Romney talking about how his wife’s not happy unless she’s on her Austrian Warmblood—a dressage horse—and about how he rides a “quarter horse” because it has such a nice gait. The Thurston B. Howell stuff has to start hurting him eventually. I don’t know why this video isn’t getting more play.

I know that Bobo and Chunky Bobo will tell us that Real Murkins love to talk about Austria Warmbloods over lunch at the Applebee’s salad bar, but I’m skeptical.

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Steal This Bike

Via Gawker, The Daily Caller’s Mark Judge lives in DC and is white.  His bike was stolen last week.  This means that because DC’s population is mostly black, that Mark Judge is now free to unleash his inner racist upon the Capital, unfettered by “guilt” or “the common sense God gave a spiny echidna” or “humanity”.  Handy!

When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”

That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.

It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.

I decided that I’m just going to let go of my white guilt. We’re all human, we all experience pain in our lives. And black pain is no different than white pain.

It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.

Sure.  It’s cool to ignore, belittle, and denigrate the black experience because you’re tired of black people basically being black in your life, and if we would just stop being black, right?  Like Trayvon Martin?  Like those five shooting victims in Tulsa?  Like President Obama and the Obama family?

See, here’s what guys like Mark here mean by “white guilt” and that is “I really don’t like black people, and I really want to affix blame for racism in America on them exclusively, because I’m sick of having to keep the presence of mind to not offend them and I really haven’t taken the time to try to understand them outside media stereotypes and the right wing bashing on the President for the last four years, and besides being a racist ass is just easier.”

So yeah, another guy goes and “speaks the truth about blacks” and he’ll be “unfairly persecuted in our overly politically correct society”.  Which is where garbage like this always ends up in the end, down the same chute of racism as the rest.

Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one.  But of course it’s our fault because we had to have collectively stolen his bike, right?  And most of all throughout American history privileged white males have of course been the real victims of the last 250 years, right?

Jesus wept.

[UPDATE]  And we have a winner in the “Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one” from MacRanger over at Macsmind.

There are black ass clowns, black racists, black murderers, rapists and even idiots running the country. We have no reason to feel guilty for that. In fact as I’ve told you on many occassions I’m 2nd generation Irish. Never felt guilt, didn’t have to. The Irish had nothing to do with the treatment of Blacks in this country and in fact in many ways were treated even worse.

It’s time to push back against liberals who have goaded whites into guilt. In light of the crimes blacks have committed against whites in the last 100 years, I say it’s even. Move on.

Really?  I mean I know Lionel Richie’s new country album is pretty bad, but…

(Cross-posted at ZVTS)

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Once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords

Ugh.

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Saturday night’s all right

This Romney bit is quite good, especially the nipple ring part.

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The stuff dreams are made of

For no particular reason—except the new season of “Mad Men”—film noir has been on my mind a lot lately. Also too, I like to talk about dark stuff on spring holidays.

So two questions:

(a) What is the best film noir that I am unlikely to have seen? I’ve seen most of the famous ones.

(b) What is the best film noir theme song? I’ll go with “Portrait of Jennie” just edging out the theme from “Laura”.

Finally, I love parodies of film noir, so much so that I enjoyed most of “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”, so I’m going to share with you an intro to a proposed film noir project that a friend of mine wrote about gerrymandering in New York State politics. It was supposed to be for my old blog, but the other people there took things a bit too seriously.

It was the kind of shape that kept the booze business going; cute on the bottom, big up top, and curves in all the right places. It should have come with a sign that said, “Danger! Hands Off!”. Instead, it read, “Map of Senate Districts in New York State” and was gerrymandered so screwy, the only way incumbents left office was in a wooden box or a jumpsuit. Running against them was a one way ticket to Palookaville. I looked at the set up. The pachyderms still ran the joint, but if the smart asses could get three more seats, they could redraw the lines in big blue markers and deep six the protection racket wholesale. Sure, I thought; about as likely as a three-legged pony winning the Preakness.

I looked across the street as mercury vapor lamps poured a head on the High Falls Brewery. It smelled like Cream of Wheat and syrup. It smelled like time for a drink. I reached for the bottle.

That’s when she walked in.

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Just because you’re paranoid

At my old local blog, we occasionally had paid trolls—from PR firms or Congressional offices—show up to say stuff about how awesome some bill was or candidate was. It always annoyed me and it’s why I’ve two or three times said I found some comment on BJ a little suspicious.

Here’s a comment we just got from some Americans Elect shill (too long to block quote so I’ll just paste it in after the dotted line):
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A unique opportunity has presented itself in the 2012 Presidential election for women to make known their political power. This opportunity has never been available before and may not ever be available again and we should not let this opportunity go by.

Americans Elect has acquired a spot on the national ballot for the November election and yet they have as of to date not been able to qualify a single candidate according to their own requirements. A seeded candidate must have 1000 support clicks in 10 different states for a total of 10,000 support clicks. A non-seeded would need 5000 from 10 different states for a total of 50,000 support clicks. They only have 3 weeks left to get someone qualified. As you know this is all done online at the Americans Elect web site http://www.americanselect.org. Signing up is simple and free and showing support is even easier. You can nominate anyone you wish and support as many as you choose.

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Out of the past

Who said this in 2006, in a piece titled “The Digital Lynch Mob”? No googling.

At any rate, there is a certain segment of the online left (and right, for that matter) who think that the key to electoral victory is to keep a certain segment of the population in a frothing rage. Any perceived slight must immediately be met with an email campaign and a ‘Wanker of the day” post that can be linked by the entire “spittle-flecked monitor” wing of the Democratic party, and that will ensure that the evil NEOCONS are kicked out of office in November.

Update. It’s our own esteemed host (via).

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Just because I haunt the same old places

I’ve been suffering from blog ennui recently, so what blogs do you recommend that I might not already be reading? I’m too lazy to remember which ones I read, so just say which ones you read that you think I might like. Feel free to pimp your own blog here.

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Local Political Blogs

I haven’t been explicit about this, but some of the Rochester readers probably know that I ran a blog about NY-29 called the Fighting 29th. I thought that would be my last effort, but redistricting put me in a new district with a competitive race, so I started a new blog, Roc25, to follow it. Since I posted something over 1,700 items in the five years, and probably got as much traffic in that time as Balloon Juice gets in a few weeks, I know that it’s hard out there for local political bloggers. Generally, your site won’t generate enough traffic for ads (I never bothered), and comments are few and far between, especially now that Facebook and Twitter have sucked up so much of the social conversation. Local race blogs are really a labor of love.

So, other than the obvious self-promotion and navel-gazing, I’m posting to ask whether there are some local race or political blogs that you follow that are updated regularly and have good insight into local elections. If I get enough of them, I could put together some kind of list and post it as a page here so those blogs could get a little more attention. I’ll start with two: one that reader HW3 sent me from Washington State called The Political Junkie, and North Decoder, which covers politics back around where I grew up.

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The Smearing of Andrew Sullivan

I know many of you are going to groan when you read this, and I expect a number of you will remember Sullivan’s fifth column/decadent left remarks and say “what goes around comes around.” And like many of you, I have my beefs with Sully- he tends to be myopic about what is actually going on around him, he tends to not think through the impact of policies that will not effect him (abortion), he relies on hucksters and right-wing frauds too often for economic analysis, and he keeps pining for some true conservatism that exists only in his mind. I get the beefs with Sullivan, I really do.

But having said all that, I’ve watched over the past few days as Jeffrey Goldberg has launched vicious smear after vicious smear at Sullivan, and it is disgusting. Some highlights:

“I think he’s a scapegoater of Jews”

“an embarrassingly rabid anti-Zionist”

“Andrew, who consistently grants the regime in Iran the benefit of the doubt on the nuclear issue while simultaneously assuming the worst about Israel’s government”

“he’s oblivious to the existence of anti-Semitism”

“But as we’ve learned over time here at The Atlantic, (and by The Atlantic, I mean here at Goldblog HQ) there’s no arguing with the guy.”

These are all just blatant lies, although my favorite is how he co-opted the entire Atlantic staff to attack Sullivan. And then he just decides to drop the whole subject, not really respond to anything, and go on hiatus. A real profile in courage.

Look- this is little more than what the Weekly Standard and the other neocon mags do whenever they disagree with someone- smear them and call them an anti-Semite. These are not the writings of an intellect with a nuanced vision of the world, this stuff is straight out of the Marty Peretz playbook. These are the kinds of grunts you’d expect from an under-educated prison guard.

There should be no place for this kind of crap, let alone from the pages of the Atlantic.

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What’s puzzling you is the nature of my game

I am not a lawyer.  I was never an MP, and I only took a couple of low-level Psychology classes in college.  I’m not remotely qualified to opine on the legal aspects of the events in Panjwej, Afghanistan last week.  What is publicly known is that for reasons known only to him, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales left his encampment where he was attached to a Special Forces team, went into the nearby village, and there, by his own admission, killed sixteen people, eleven of whom were from the same family.  He did this using his individual weapon, and a knife or bayonet.  He wounded six others.  At some point during this, he set several of the bodies on fire.  He then returned to his camp, where he was questioned about the gunfire by the other Americans there.  He apparently admitted having killed several people and then surrendered his weapon and was taken under arrest, at which point he demanded to see an attorney (reports indicate that he had a specific attorney in mind from the get-go) and refused to answer any further questions.

In the days since, we’ve heard various stories about how his personal finances were in difficulty, about how he had multiple combat tours and had been passed over for promotion, that he had a traumatic brain injury, and all sorts of things that people are coming up with to try and explain why he did what he did.  A lot of it has a whiff of  ‘the other’ to it, as if by discovering some unique personal tragedy or problem for SSG Bales, that the author could show how he is different from us and how this act is unique to Bales and, by implication, people like him.  The short version of my response to this is “Bullshit.”

Hundreds of thousands of US Servicemembers have been diagnosed with PTSD.  Tens of thousands have been diagnosed with TBI.  Tens of thousands have both diagnoses.  Only a handful have committed serious crimes, and only one is accused of murdering sixteen civilians in their beds.  SSG Bales is, and of right ought to be permitted to put on whatever defense he finds most availing, in a trial that will be as fair as possible.  Considering statements made by his lawyer, I believe that it is highly likely he will use some kind of a diminished capacity defense.  Personally, I think that TBI and/or PTSD aside, he could very well just be an asshole.

I read a book a long time ago called Alone With the Devil: Famous Cases of a Courtroom Psychiatrist, by Ronald Markman, M.D.  The title of the book refers to the fact that the forensic psychiatrist does his interviews with criminals and criminal suspects alone, and that there’s not a whole hell of a lot he can do if the subject decides to attack him.  But he also refers, particularly in cases of true mental illness, to the fact that the patient himself is alone with the devil.  And last, in discussing some people who “just snap”, he posits that we, all of us, are at some point in our lives, alone with the devil.  Markman also cautions us that not everyone who does something really bad is mentally ill.  One case he discusses at length concerns a woman who drove her car through a knot of pedestrians in Lake Tahoe, CA, and killed several of them.  There was nothing wrong with her, mentally.  She was just pissed off at the world, and decided that somebody was going to pay.  In my own experience, I am convinced that Markman is right.  The line between upstanding citizen and murderer is far thinner than most of us would imagine, or admit to imagining.

One attempt that gets kind of close to the truth of the matter, or as close as we can get with what we currently know, is this piece in the New Yorker, by George Packer.

In a sense, none of these facts matter. It shouldn’t be hard to see the bright line between war fatigue, or P.T.S.D., or whatever name you give it, and hunting down, shooting, and stabbing little children in their homes, and women and men, burning their bodies, and then returning to base and demanding a lawyer.

I am given to the irony that as one of the more prominent cheerleaders for war, Packer himself ought to think about issuing a couple of mea culpas but he doesn’t do so here.

My own feelings about this subject are much more eloquently expressed by Jason Fritz, writing at the Ink Spots blog:

This entire situation is sad – for the Army, for Bales and his family and his unit, and especially for the Afghans who lost loved ones. Let’s keep perspective on that. And let’s not take the easy way out and blame The Man for the actions of a man because it fits your narrative. That’s not justice and it’s irresponsible. Robert Bales is not the victim here – the victims are in Afghanistan.

 

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Open Thread

Talk amongst yourselves about various and what-have-you.

Some potential topics:

Peyton Manning has decided to sign with the Denver Broncos, who will try to trade Tim Tebow. LINK

Multiple Choice Mitt bashed “the faculty lounge at Harvard” yesterday. Favorably cites Harvard prof today. LINK

It seems that Jihad and rap don’t go well together. Rapping Jihadi Now Fears Terrorist Pals Will Kill Him

Personal Observation—once President Obama began the withdrawal from Iraq, the main thing that semi-sane people loved about Ron Paul became irrelevant.  In light of this, people have started to take a look at the man.  A look that doesn’t need to be a long, hard look, btw, and have noticed that he’s BATSHIT INSANE.

Tomorrow night is the season finale for Southland.  Boo.  Hiss.

Seagate Technologies has reached areal density of 1Tb/inch for computer hard drives.  The largest hard drives available today are 3TB drives.  This new density will allow drives in the 3.5in standard format to achieve volumes of 60TB within 10 years.  It won’t really matter though, because most of you will still not back up your data regularly.  For those that do, however, that’s an epic shitload of LOLcats and Rickroll videos you’ll be hoarding.

Also too,  I have a 13-year-old daughter, so I read The Hunger Games last night.  She wants to see the movie, and had read the book for a book report at school.  I tend to think I should be involved on some level in my children’s lives, so I sat down with a copy on my B/N Nook.  I read it in one sitting.  It doesn’t suffer from cheesy writing like a lot of YA fiction.  It’s a simple read, but an engrossing story well told.  I’m looking forward to the movie, where I will doubtless drive my daughter and her friends to the theater and then sit nowhere near her because apparently having a parent is like, soooo embarrassing, dad! (eye roll)

 

 

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Everyone Expects The Huffington Position

I’m going to go ahead and politely say that this is energy best spent elsewhere by Arianna, considering.

The measure of President Obama should be the bar set for him by Candidate Obama. Unfortunately, the way the race has shaped up, the bar is set considerably lower. Take, for example, the questions David Axelrod was asked just before Super Tuesday. They included one about Newt Gingrich’s call for Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to be fired and, of course, one about Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” comments. That’s a pretty low bar for the Obama campaign to jump over. And if, as the campaign moves forward, the majority of the questions President Obama and his surrogates are going to be faced with are simply responding to whatever outlandish statements are coming from the Republicans, that’s clearly not going to be the most productive debate the country could be having. Given the real problems we’re facing, and the fact that a presidential election should be the time to discuss and debate them, the bar should be much, much higher than that.

So instead of simply asking President Obama to respond to the most extreme or bizarre Republican statements, how about asking him instead to respond to the boldest and most ambitious statements from… Barack Obama?

At HuffPost, our plan for 2012 is to vigorously cover both tracks of the election. Which is to say that while we are exhaustively covering the race between President Obama and the Republican nominee, we’re also going to be covering that second track: Obama vs. Obama. And we’ll be covering it in a variety of ways: by comparing the reality of President Obama with the rhetoric of Candidate Obama; by focusing on real underlying problems in the country that are being temporarily masked by a slight improvement in the unemployment numbers; and by using satire.

NOOOOOOOOOOOBODY expects the Huffington Position! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: comparison, problem focus, satire, ruthless efficiency from not paying contributors, an almost fanatical devotion to Centrism, and a nice web layout – Oh damn!  I’ll come in again.

Look folks, if you’re devoting your considerable reach and power to this re-election battle being about What Obama Hasn’t Done Yet before he gets re-elected to have a chance to do it, I’m going to say that you may not be fully vested in the idea that he should be re-elected, follow?  I understand that the President has made some mistakes, and has done things that I don’t agree with, especially when it comes to civil liberties.   Considering what he has accomplished, I’m hoping that this will be taken into balanced consideration.  When the other party’s response is “Let’s reduce the last one hundred fifty years of American progress to a shiny, slightly concave crater of smooth, blackened glass and take a mulligan on everything after ‘and the Union was preserved’ okay?” I’m thinking the time for holding the President’s feet to the fire on things is, you know, November 7th, and not now.  I’m completely willing to have the debate Arianna wants…as soon as we keep the Morlocks, Mole People, and CHUDS in the GOP from eating our flesh.

Even better, I would think that time and energy would be invested in getting NANCY SMASH back her gavel, and keeping the Senate, in addition to keeping the White House.  If you haven’t noticed, the Republicans have spent the last 15 months dumping trucks of salt on the earth after covering it with napalm, cat pee, and graffiti that reads “TEA PARTY RULZ.”  We might want to do something about that rather than saying “You know, Candidate Obama hasn’t delivered on all of his campaign promises.”  Congratulations on that insight and welcome to politics.  Keeping those promises will require a Congress not led by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, capiche?

I’d say that I can’t believe anyone in that position would be that dense, but given the person making the call, everyone should have expected it by now.

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I Can’t Help Falling In Mild Contempt With You

Expanding on Mistermix’s post below, Kevin Drum writes an article entitled “Barack Obama’s Had a Pretty Damn Good Presidency” and then proceeds to trash him for about 75% of the article, without a trace of irony.

As long as we’re piling on, I’d add a few other items to that list. First,Obama seems to despise the progressive base. He and his associates have made that clear over and over again.Second, he allowed Congress to take the lead on most of his domestic agenda. Whether this was smart or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it makes him seem almost like an observer of events over the past three years, not a commander-in-chief. Third, from a progressive point of view, his record on national security is pretty bad. No, we’re not torturing prisoners anymore, but the NSA surveillance program is still in place, American citizens are being targeted for assassination, the Afghanistan war has been escalated, drone attacks have skyrocketed, the state secrets privilege is still being used with abandon, Guantánamo is still open, and Patriot Act abuse seems to be as robust as ever.

He then lists things the President has actually accomplished…despite being arrogant and subservient at the same time while remaining worse than Bush.  Then he goes back to trashing him and concludes he took the best road available of a number of bad choices.

Now, it’s true that any serious accounting also has to include Obama’s domestic failures—most notably his feckless housing policy and his inability to pass cap-and-trade—but both of those were very heavy political lifts. (On cap-and-trade in particular, I think in retrospect that it was just flatly never going to happen no matter what Obama did.) There’s also his weak record on judicial appointments. So could Obama have done better? Was there a more effective way to deal with an unprecedentedly obstructive Republican Party? On reflection, I doubt it. During Obama’s first two years, Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for only 14 weeks. This means that Obama needed two or three Republican votes for every bill, and if he had taken the blustering, partisan attitude that a lot of liberals wanted, he never would had gotten them. Republican obstructionism would have been even more hardened than it was with his more conciliatory attitude. So as annoying as Obama’s “most reasonable man in the room” act was to the progressive base, it was probably his best strategy.

Such praise worthy of the ancient deities of yore, a mighty and resounding “meh” echoes through the halls of history.  And Kevin here actually wonders why the President has such a hard time getting across his accomplishments to the American people.

I can’t possibly wonder why that would be the case, nor who could possibly be responsible for such a state of affairs.  Sully was right when he said if a Republican POTUS had accomplished what President Obama had done, we’d be carving his likeness into Mount Rushmore.  And yet, we’re doing everything we can to hand the country back over to the Banana Splits.

People keep tripping over themselves to come up with explanations as why to President’s Obama’s most famous first has nothing to do with any of this, of course.  Those excuses, and the constant dogpiling on the President, are both wearing very thin, and we’re starting to run out of plausible explanations as to why the liberal media is so invested in the “Is this milk spoiled?  Taste this for me!” theory of the President’s accomplishments.

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