Later On

The Constitution is clearly central to the US as a state, but many have little respect for it—particularly for the Bill of Rights. (I’m thinking of those who seem to hate the ACLU, which strives to protect the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, when it is threatened.)

Here’s a terrific research site focused on the Constitution. Browse around a little. Invaluable for students of any age.

Matthew Yglesias:

Julie Gunlock complains at NRO that “food snobs” are ruining America by serving unduly fancy food at soup kitchens. It’s actually rare that conservatives get to combined their hatred of poor people with their hatred of “cultural elites” in a single argument, so Gunlock gets so busy dishing out the sarcasm that she can’t quite seem to deliver the “so what?” point where we see who is being harmed by this alleged trend.

But more perniciously, throughout the piece she runs together the idea of soup kitchens being too “snobbish” about what food they serve with the idea of soup kitchens being health-conscious about the food they serve. This is an important distinction to make, however. When people can’t get enough to eat, they become malnourished. The point of charitable food assistance is to help people avoid that fate. That means, however, that it’s foolish to ignore the nutritional content of what you’re serving. Oftentimes, the situation is so dire that you can’t afford to fuss too much about this. People in Somalia and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa are teetering on the brink of starvation and need food by any means necessary. But fortunately for us, even in this economy the United States is not a drought-ravaged, famine-stricken, war-torn, malgoverned third world state. We’re not facing imminent mass starvation. So it’s eminently sensible for people trying to bring food to those in need to be paying attention to the differential health impact of different meals.

Very interesting post by Dan Froomkin, which begins:

I’ve been amazed at how little media pickup there’s been of the
revelation by the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that the White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a "ticking time bomb" scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks.

Now comes Lawrence Wilkerson, the firebrand former chief of staff to Colin Powell, who writes on the Washington Note blog with more on that story.

And he traces it right back to former vice president Dick Cheney.
"[W]hat I have learned," Wilkerson writes, "is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

"So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee ‘was compliant’ (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, ‘revealed’ such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

"There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just ‘committed suicide‘ in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)"

Wilkerson first came to my attention in October 2005, when he went public with his conclusion that a secret cabal led by the vice president has hijacked U.S. foreign policy, inveigled the president, condoned torture and crippled the ability of the government to respond to emergencies.

Was he wrong? Hardly. And Wilkerson, a Republican, has been a persistent and prescient critic of the Bush/Cheney regime — and its effect on his party — ever since.

As for Cheney, his sudden visibility is stirring up a lot of strong feelings — and dark humor. For the last three days, my "Cartoon Watch" has been dominated by Cheney cartoons.

Dan Balz writes in The Washington Post: …

Continue reading.

Very helpful for the freelancer. Take a look.

One guy I knew in sales, who worked a territory from his home, treated his job as if he was a freelancer. If he needed something that would make him more productive (and make him more money), he didn’t wait for the company to issue it. He would request whatever it was (fax, cellphone, computer, and so on), and if the request was not approved, he’d buy it anyway. He figured he was in business for himself, and he would buy the tools he needed. Often the company would, a year or two or three later, actually issue the device in question, but in the meantime he had made enough extra money from already having it that he more than paid the expense. Plus, because he located the locus of control in himself rather than in the company, he had a much healthier mental attitude toward his work.

All that is to say that, even if you’re not a freelancer, you should take a look and see which tools might give you more support and control for your own job.

Very good post. Take a look.

Of course, the US has the best medical system in the world—in other nations, people sometimes have to wait to see a doctor. But not in the US! Right?

Mantic has a vivid and interesting report on his recent medical emergency and recovery. Recommended.

It’s not ambiguous: waterboarding is torture and is illegal under settled case law. Watch this video:

I got this from an excellent post on Barry Eisler’s blog, which you really should read in its entirety. It begins:

Just got back to Tokyo after another week on the road for Fault Line promotion. No time to write while I was traveling, but I did have a chance to read a number of establishment opinion pieces about torture. They were so alike in various respects that they could have have been churned out by the same government press office. The most glaring similarity was an omission of any discussion or even acknowledgment of the role of the law. Reading these opinions and knowing nothing else, you could be forgiven for believing that no law on torture or other cruel, inhumane, or other degrading treatment even exists, let alone that such laws might matter.

A sampling:

David Broder in The Washington Post: "But now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past." That’s one way of looking at it. Another way would be that this is simply about prosecuting criminals. But if you refuse to recognize that the law should even a part of the discussion — that applicable law even exists — I can see where you might look at things in the stunted, distorted way Broder does.

Ross Douthat in the New York Times: "We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its senses – but so that we can learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus." Yes, if you think people who break the law should be prosecuted and punished, you have taken leave of your senses. You’d have to be crazy to argue something like that.

Tom Friedman in the New York Times: …

Continue reading.

I mentioned earlier the enjoyable WWII spy thriller caper mystery Where Eagles Dare. I noticed a brief exchange in the movie in which German officers casually refer to the torture that will be visited upon some prisoners. Those were the days when a nation that used torture was condemned for the practice and strongly contrasted with the US, which did not torture its prisoners. Those days are gone: the US is now just another torture nation. We can work our way out, but not (I think) by deciding that only those at the lowest ranks (Sgt. Graner and others) will be punished as scapegoats and those who formally authorized torture and those who systematically tortured be exposed, investigated, and punished. If we omit that step, it will be understand that somewhere, in the background and under cover, the US continues to torture its prisoners.

It took longer than I expected. I thought I’d be under 20 minutes easily, but it was 22 min 41 seconds. Obviously, I’m somewhat out of shape. I think I was clocking off 15-minute miles when I was walking more regularly. I’m going to give it a week of 1-mile walks before I start going longer.

BTW, I hope you’ve read the wonderful mystery short-story "The Nine-Mile Walk," included in the book of the same name.

Dan Froomkin has a good dissection of the (lazy) position quoted in the title, whose purpose is to lead to the conclusion that "No one’s guilty". (Cf. Max Beerbohm’s "When everybody is somebody then nobody is anybody.") Froomkin begins:

As torture chronicler extraordinaire Mark Danner has pointed out, one of the great paradoxes of the torture scandal "is that it is not about things we didn’t know but about things we did know and did nothing about."

It was, for instance, in December 2002 that Dana Priest and Barton Gellman first reported on the front page of the Washington Post that American interrogators were subjecting detainees to "stress and duress" techniques. James Risen, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis first told the world about waterboarding in May 2004.

But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us are as guilty as the people who committed the crimes — or that those who ordered those crimes should avoid accountability.

Jacob Weisberg now joins Michael Kinsley, however, in arguing that the nation’s collective guilt for torture is so great that prosecution is a cop-out. Kinsley, as I noted on Friday, wrote: "If you’re going to punish people for condoning torture, you’d better include the American citizenry itself…Prosecuting a few former government officials for their role in putting our country into the torture business would not serve justice or historical memory. It would just let the real culprits off the hook."

And here is Weisberg, writing in Newsweek: "By 2003, if you didn’t understand that the United States was inflicting torture upon those deemed enemy combatants, you weren’t paying much attention. This is part of what makes applying a criminal-justice model to those most directly responsible such a bad idea. The issue we need to come to terms with is not just who in the Bush administration did what, but our collective complicity in their decision….Prosecuting Bush and his men won’t absolve the rest of us for what we let them do."

There are two big problems with this argument, however. While it’s true that the public’s outrage over torture has been a long time coming, one reason for that is the media’s sporadic and listless coverage of the issue. Yes, there were some extraordinary examples of investigative reporting we can point to, but other news outlets generally didn’t pick up these exclusives. Nobody set up a torture beat, to hammer away daily at what history I think will show was one of the major stories of the decade. Heck, as Weisberg himself points out, some of his colleagues were actually cheerleaders for torture. By failing to return to the story again and again — with palpable outrage — I think the media actually normalized torture. We had an obligation to shout this story from the rooftops, day and night. But instead we lulled the public into complacency.

Secondly, …

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I bought a couple of baskets for storage, but before I could use them, Megs adopted the smaller for her own. The smaller still sits inside the larger, which I’ve not got around to using yet.

Barry Eisler (author of the John Rain series and the new (non-John-Rain) novel Fault Line) has a blog, where resides this excellent post:

As I pointed out recently, it’s difficult to keep up with the denial, obfuscation, and sheer, tendentious illogic of torture apologists. Even now, despite Bush-era DOJ memos acknowledging that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, Liz Cheney is still clinging to the Jack Bauer fantasy that KSM had to be tortured (actually, she denies it was torture) because the administration "knew there was a threat of imminent attack." And Dick Cheney claims he had to torture because his oath of office required him "to protect and defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic." Actually, Article 2, Section 1 of Constitution requires the following oath: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." See if you can spot the difference to which Dick Cheney is willfully blind.

I was planning on creating a list of the justifications torture apologists trot out most reliably, but as it turns out, I don’t have to. Recently I received several messages from a persistent apologist that serve as a nice summary of the sort of bullshit the right and the MSM peddle as a matter of course. Each numbered point below is a verbatim quote from my apologist correspondent; my thoughts interpolated. For a few equally absurd but dangerous arguments my correspondent overlooked, here’s Dan Froomkin on the emerging "You can’t prosecute politicians because the whole country is guilty" argument.

Now, obviously the gentleman who’s advancing these arguments is not going to change his mind. It’s fair to ask, therefore, what’s the point of responding. The answer, I think, is this. On any given subject, there will be a core group so wedded to a belief that the belief will be impervious to all contrary evidence. But not everyone has his head buried this deeply in the sand, and there will always be some people (many people, I optimistically maintain) who can be persuaded by facts and reason. As I said in the comment section to a previous post on gay equality:

"Persuading any given individual is only part of the purpose of a discussion like this one. In fact, there’s a much more important function: by subjecting dogmatic, fearful, irrational opinions to the light of reason, we expose them for what they are. And over time, views that were once respectable become untenable, and then increasingly disreputable, until finally even the few people who still cling to them are too embarrassed to utter them in polite society. This is the very history of the fight against racism, bigotry, and intolerance. We can all feel proud to have contributed to this chapter of that history — after all, even those of us whose contribution has been unintentional are playing an important part."

And now, the torture apologists’ apologies: …

Continue reading.

When will he give it up. I understand that the determination to get this specific idea confirmed accounted for a fair amount of the torture, but there was no connection. Hussein was against religious jihads—he was quite secular, and he didn’t want any wild cards in Iraq. Jonathan Landay in McClatchy:

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn’t true.

Cheney’s 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration’s case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I’m aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side," said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. "That was something they were tasked to look at."

He said he was unaware of the origins of the directive, but a former senior U.S. intelligence official has told McClatchy that Cheney’s and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s offices were demanding that information in 2002 and 2003. The official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter, requested anonymity.

During the same period, two alleged senior al Qaida operatives in CIA custody were waterboarded repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed at least 183 times.

A 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report said that the two were questioned about the relationship between al Qaida and Iraq, and that both denied knowing of one.

A U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Paul Burney, told the Army Inspector General’s office in 2006 that during the same period, interrogators at Guantanamo were under pressure to produce evidence of al Qaida-Iraq ties, but were unable to do so…

Continue reading.

Bookmark this page. I assume that the timeline is continually updated as new facts emerge.

I must admit that I find industry to be an untrustworthy partner, primarily because industry (that is, corporations) must observe the legal requirement to maximize profit—whatever it takes, so long as it doesn’t actually break the law. Unethical, immoral, and dishonest tactics are fine, so long as no law is broken, and industry exploits every loophole and every tactic that will better profits.

So why is Obama meeting with the health industry as part of planning. The realistic answer is that this group is going to be involved no matter what: keep your friends close and your enemies closer is the rule being obeyed. Still, it does give one pause.

David Sirota has a good article in Salon:

The most stunning and least reported news about President Barack Obama’s press conference with health industry executives this week wasn’t those executives’ willingness to negotiate with a Democrat. It was that Democrat’s eagerness to involve those executives in a discussion about healthcare reform even as they revealed their previous plans to pilfer $2 trillion from Americans.

That was the little-noticed message from the made-for-TV spectacle that administration officials called a healthcare "game changer": In saying they can voluntarily slash $200 billion a year off the country’s medical bills over the next decade and still preserve their profits, healthcare companies implicitly acknowledged they were plotting to fleece consumers and have been fleecing them for years. With that acknowledgment came the tacit admission that the industry’s business is based not on respectable returns, but on grotesque profiteering and waste — the kind that can give up $2 trillion and still guarantee huge margins.

Chief among the profiteers at the White House event were insurance companies, which have raised premiums by 119 percent since 1999, and one obvious question is why — why would Obama engage those particular thieves?

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I’m seeing LOTS of indications that I should resume long, pleasant walks (moderate pace). Trent Hamm has a very good post on that issue, which begins:

Several months ago, I visited my doctor during the process of figuring out an illness that was sapping a lot of my energy. One of the first things he did was to order a general blood panel, just to see if one of several common things popped up.

While we never did figure out the illness (my energy recovered a few months later and it was decided that my illness was caused by a mix of a virus and seasonal affective disorder), the blood tests did reveal an unusual number related to my liver, which, frankly, scared me quite a bit. My family has a history of liver problems, and my grandfather and my uncle both died of cirrhotic livers.

After several additional tests, I went to the doctor for a final appointment, where he informed me that I had a fat streak in my liver that would make me more susceptible to cirrhosis in the future, as well as much more susceptible to developing type 2 diabetes (again, a worry, because there are multiple cases of this in my family tree).

Instead of asking for a cure or for a prescription to “make it better,” my first question was quite simple. “What can I do on my own to help improve this?”

He listed several things: …

Continue reading. His response is how a true adult would respond.

I recently sent The Sister my pepper sauce recipe template:

Fill blender jar with whatever peppers you want, after cutting off stems. (Don’t remove seeds.) The original recommendation was to use only ripe peppers, but I’ve tried using green jalapeños in the mix with no problem. I usually include a few habaneros for heat.

Add 1/4 cup salt

Add whatever liquids (vinegar should be the main one, but in addition to that I’ve also used dark rum, lime juice, lemon juice, etc. Once I even put a whole Meyer lemon in with the peppers and blended that whole thing.) to bring it to just above a quart. The original called for white vinegar, but I generally use white wine vinegar or red wine vinegar, sometimes apple cider vinegar, and occasionally add some balsamic vinegar.

UPDATE: Recently, in addition to the vinegar, I’ve been adding some olive oil on the assumption that some flavor components are oil-soluble in addition to those that are water-soluble. You also could try adding some peeled cloves of garlic, either fresh or roasted. I’ve also added strawberries, and I imagine peaches would be nice.

Blend, then pour into a pot

Simmer covered for 20 min

Cool 10 min, then pour back into blender jar

Blend again

Bottle (I use these bottles.)

Now I see that the Simple Dollar has a casserole recipe template (from the Tightwad Gazette):

… One of my favorite pieces of Amy Dacyczyn’s Complete Tightwad Gazette is her framework for a simple, quick casserole on page 625:

1 cup main ingredient
1 cup second ingredient
1-2 cups starchy ingredient
1 1/2 cups binder
1/4 cup “goodie”
seasoning
topping

Main ingredient: tuna, cubed chicken, turkey, ham, seafood, etc.
Second ingredient: thinly sliced celery, mushrooms, peas, chopped hard-boiled eggs, etc.
Starchy ingredient: thinly sliced potatoes, cooked noodles, cooked rice, etc.
Binder: cream sauce, sour cream, can of soup, etc.
“Goodie”: pimiento, olives, almonds, water chestnuts, etc.
Topping: cheese, bread crumbs, etc.

The advantage of this recipe structure is the flexibility. All you have to do is have one item in each category that seem to at least reasonably match well in terms of flavor. Cook any uncooked element thoroughly, put all the items in a large pot, and gently cook it over a steady heat, and just ten minutes or so later, you have an original creation on the table – just as healthy or unhealthy as you want it to be.

Here are a few examples of casseroles using this framework that work well for us…

Check out the examples.

Constant Reader and I have differed somewhat on our views of Obama, and it got me to thinking. I see three main ways in which Obama is viewed:

Norm-referenced: This is Constant Reader’s view, more or less, and is (I think) a realistic view. Look at Obama in comparison with other presidents we’ve had in the past 50 years or so and in the context of the current situation. He’s doing what he can do, given the Congressional GOP resistance and the current media obsession with looking at everything through the lens of a contest, without serious consideration of policy: who’s up, who’s down, who’s winning, who’s losing. In that context, he must pick his battles with care and move carefully. In addition, of course, he must address the state of the economy after 8 years of Bush-Cheney—a major task in itself. Moreover, he is a centrist Democrat, not a progressive—but in the comparison to other presidents, he looks pretty good.

Standards-referenced: This is my view, more or less. People looking at Obama from this perspective have in mind a list of goals, and Obama is judged on how well he addresses those goals—and on a fairly short timeline. People in this group (speaking of myself, mainly) tend to ignore context in creating their progressive agenda and want Obama working through it (without regard to fallout): end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, convene a tribunal of some sort to investigate thoroughly the torture program and those who authorized it and bring charges based on US law, including the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Convention, both of which are now US law, having been ratified. We want progressives appointed to fill Executive Branch positions.

Wingnuts: This is the noisy group that believe Obama is determined to destroy the economy so that he can remake it on a Socialist pattern, that he is “a loon”, that he can’t speak without a teleprompter, and so on: statements grounded in their fears rather than based on facts. (One of the great lessons on negotiation stated in Fisher and Ury’s fine book Getting to Yes is to avoid judging others’ intentions based on your own fears.)

Once I step back and consider what’s possible in the context of the country today, I have to admit that Obama is doing a much better job than most presidents. He’s working hard on instituting meaningful healthcare reform, and though people of my persuasion want a national single-payer system built from the best and most effective parts of those countries that have experience in that (Germany, France, Switzerland, Canada, England, Sweden, the Netherlands—well, all the industrialized world except the US), just getting a government option is going to be hard enough.

The fact is that Obama must deal with Congress, and Congress is chockablock with men and women who worry not about the country but about their next election and how they will fund it, and thus listen to the people from their district who contribute the most. So, for example, Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, ostensibly a Democrat, doesn’t really care that much about what’s best for the country as a whole or the core beliefs of the Democratic party. What she cares about is what’s best for Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, and other big contributors—the companies, not the employees or the consumers.

Bottom line: I can work on adopting a more realistic outlook: pushing for programs that seem important for the country, but recognizing the obstacles that stand in the way. And, of course, I can contribute to funds that, for example, encourage progressive challenges to Blue Dog Democrats and the like.

Taken this morning. Megs has a good life.

The lather from the D.R. Harris Almond shave stick is as good as lather gets, but the fragrance definitely takes a back seat to that from an almond shaving cream. Still, it was a great shave: the Apollo Mikron does a superb job—a favorite razor for sure. And TOBS Mr. Taylor’s aftershave was a fine finish.

Now for some tea.