Wow! Some people with Backbone! This is the bill they overrode the veto on.
In other news, Darth Cheney’s impeachment has been blocked. Kucinich turns down hunting invitation.
This post is in: Politics
Wow! Some people with Backbone! This is the bill they overrode the veto on.
In other news, Darth Cheney’s impeachment has been blocked. Kucinich turns down hunting invitation.
This post is in: Politics
Rudy Giuliani loves to give the impression that he is tough on crime and that he is responsible for the decrease in crime in New York City while he was mayor. Well, it’s possible that some of the cosmetic changes he made to the city reduced crime a little bit! But I think this is the best explanation, and I only bring it up because I’m not sure if you all have heard it before**
The theoretical justification for our argument rests on two simple assumptions: 1) Legalized abortion leads to fewer “unwanted” babies being born, and 2) unwanted babies are more likely to suffer abuse and neglect and are therefore at an increased risk for criminal involvement later in life. The first assumption, that abortion reduces the number of unwanted children, is true virtually by definition. The second assumption, that unwanted children are at increased risk for criminal involvement, is supported by three decades of academic research. If one accepts these two assumptions, then a direct mechanism by which the legalization of abortion can reduce crime has been established. At that point, the question merely becomes: Is the magnitude of the impact large or small?
Our preliminary research suggests that the effect of abortion legalization is large.
Read it all if you haven’t before. For those of you who have read Freakonomics, this is old news, of course. But I wish someone would bring this up. It’s be political suicide, but it would be funny and it’d be a lot of fun to watch the Righties squirm- and maybe the Dems, too!! After all, abortion has caused a glut of lettuce pickers, dontcha know.
**So far, I have to say that I don’t think there is anything that the collective hive here hasn’t heard before, but you never know! I filed this under “Politics” because there was no “John Cole Loves Abortion” category.
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
God forbid we have some semblance of transparency in law enforcement. That just won’t do!
The first recommendation would have required that prosecutors who use jailhouse “snitches” corroborate snitch testimony with other evidence. […]
The second reform would have required police to videotape interrogations in violent crime investigations. […]
The commission’s third recommendation … would have established a task force to look into eyewitness testimony, and set up a series of voluntary guidelines for the state’s police departments to follow to ensure that police lineups aren’t overly suggestive.
Every one of these sensible recommendations was vetoed by Schwarzenegger. Unbelievable.
by John Cole| 46 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
And listening to Zappa while waiting for a flight and looking at all the people and writing about it is interesting.
Consider this another open thread.
*** Update ***
I made it to Orlando with no problems. It turns out my traveling mate is on a watch list, so that slowed us down a bit (the TSA agent told us that he should register for future flights using his middle name in the future to avoid such inconveniences. Take that, Osama!). I am also proud to report that with a wireless internet connection, a cell phone, and an Ipod, all modern conveniences designed to help us keep in touch with people, I managed to ignore everyone around me for the bulk of the trip. I call that a win.
Things did get sketchy on the flight, though, when a lack of sleep, a fresh cup of black death coffee, and an unfortunate Ipod shuffle (Talking Heads- Swamp into Les Claypool into Rage Against The Machine) made me feel all Patrick Bateman for a minute or two, but other than that, everything was uneventful.
This post is in: Democratic Stupidity
Make of it what you will. One quote sticks out for me:
My colleagues who oppose his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, for one, commended Judge Mukasey as “a brilliant lawyer, a distinguished jurist and by all accounts a good man.”
I’m sorry. If you can’t look me in the eye and tell me waterboarding is torture, then I could never think of you as a good man.
Schumer’s Rationale For Supporting MukaseyPost + Comments (37)
by Tim F| 95 Comments
This post is in: Politics
….So I just get through speculating that the bursting of the housing bubble might be responsible for the growing number of people who trust Democrats more than Republicans to manage the economy, and what pops up on the front page of the LA Times? A story about the housing bubble turning Republicans into Independents and Democrats
To recap, these people were Republicans when they had a steady job, health insurance, a suburban house and a SUV, but switched to the social welfare party as soon as times went bad. I’m sorry if this sounds insensitive, but that’s pathetic. If you spend your life voting to force people in hard times to get off their ass and take some responsibility for their lives then suck it up and practice what you preach when the bottle stops on you. Alexander Bain provides context (emphasis mine):
For our present purpose it is sufficient to say that the inferential process involves the formation of a habit. For it produces a belief, or opinion; and a genuine belief, or opinion, is something on which a man is prepared to act, and is therefore, in a general sense, a habit.
Bain helped found the psychological/philosophical school of thought called pragmatism. Another prominent member, the SCOTUS Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, famously argued that judicial reasoning is the process by which judges justify decisions that they have already made. While one could argue over whether pragmatism is an optimal lens for viewing the world, I think the perspective is helpful here. If a Republican’s core beliefs cannot survive their first test then it seems safe to say that, except in he most superficial sense, he or she never believed them at all. It turns out that deep inside most people believe in social fairness, even if a significant number mostly feels that society should be fair to them.
To put it another way, the difference between losing the house and someone else losing theirs is the difference between a tragedy and a statistic. I don’t make a distinction between the two in terms of the policies I support, and I guess it strikes me as weird that so many people do.
This post is in: Politics, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
For those who don’t read the “Republican or Bust” crowd at The Corner, they’re a little rattled today. Yesterday, Ron Paul raised an astonishing $4,000,000.
Update: Glenn Greenwald has thoughts.