For the Record: Rant on Retroaction

Reporter from the Future, by Flickr/The People Speak. Via Sputnik International, I'm sorry to say, which may have meant for the picture to be taken as news.

I may be starting to repeat myself a bit, but Donald Jr. kind of got me going:

Pretty sure the actual constitutional crisis is the prior administration weaponizing the DOJ and FBI to undermine a duly elected president with information paid for by his opponent with no basis in fact. But run with the Dem talkers. You do you. 🙄 https://t.co/SgEMTRiBBa

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 4, 2018

Plus senior members of Congress, Nunes and Ryan, Grassley and Graham, openly working with him to obstruct the investigation of his misdeeds, in totally unprecedented violation of the separation of powers, Nunes taking orders straight from White House.

— OrderOnIneptitude (@Yastreblyansky) February 5, 2018

Really shouldn't have missed failing to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, from the endless sabotaging of the Affordable Care Act to blatant refusal to implement the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, signed into law by Donald Trump on August 2, though he called it "seriously flawed" in his signing statement, after votes of 98-2 in the Senate and 419-3 in the House.

That's for the constitutional crisis, but that "take down a duly elected president" bullshit struck me as illustrating a deep retroactionary confusion that is a big part of this Nunes idiocy.

For the record

Sleepy San Salvador street. Why did Reagan send thousands of prison-hardened Los Angeles gangbangers to destroy this peace? Photo by Jan van Oosthuizen.

The weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama Admin. allowed bad MS 13 gangs to form in cities across U.S. We are removing them fast!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2017

MS-13 formed 1980s in badly run California prisons. Exported to Central America and Mexico by policy of deporting instead of rehabilitating https://t.co/QaKyn8YuU2

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) April 18, 2017

Unless he's thinking in retroactionary terms that the malign influence of the Obama presidency stretches backwards, into the past. The virulence of the MS-13 organization in particular has to with the way it was nourished by US criminal justice policy, which was to deal with the problem by outsourcing it, deporting members in huge numbers to their home countries, especially El Salvador and Honduras, where they overwhelmed weak local governments, taking over the streets and recruiting new members and systematizing the smuggling of people back to the US, and participating alongside the Sinaloa Cartel in the Mexican drug war. A Trump-like policy over most of the past 30 years has made them ever stronger.

David Brooks is not optimistic—so I guess everything will be fine

Photo by Frank J. Regan via examiner.com.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Green Tech Solution", New York Times, December 1 2015:

Sure Republican politicians are bad, pretending to believe there's no such thing as global warming out of fear of Rush Limbaugh, but aren't Democratic politicians more or less the same, hoping that a formal agreement among 130-something countries to reduce carbon emissions could help to slow the warming process? After all, governments will probably cheat, so it would be much better to get corporations to do everything.

Brooks's example of governments cheating is China:

Retroactionary economics: The Republican debate

Drawing by Dan Piraro, 2013.

But enough of this talk about what divides Republicans! I want to focus on what unites them as seen in last night's debate, notably a totally delusional economic world view, as in this remarkable answer from Fiorina, in which she agrees ("yes") with the questioner by asserting the exact opposite of what he said:

GERARD BAKER:

...Now, in seven years under President Obama, the U.S. has added an average of 107,000 jobs a month. Under President Clinton, the economy added about 240,000 jobs a month. Under George W. Bush, it was only 13,000 a month. If you win the nomination, you’ll probably be facing a Democrat named Clinton. How are you going to respond to the claim that Democratic presidents are better at creating jobs than Republicans?

FIORINA:

Well, first of all, I must say as I think about that question, I think about a woman I met the other day.... A mother is going to bed afraid for her children’s future.

And the reason she’s afraid for her children’s future is because we’ve had problems for a long time. Yes, problems have gotten much worse under Democrats. But the truth is, this government has been growing bigger and bigger, more corrupt, less effective, crushing the engine of economic growth for a very long time. 

Faith works miracles: Time travel edition

Hi C&L fans! Thanks, Batocchio!

Or is he just another secret Muslim? (Via)

I was startled to hear on the radio this morning the story, from the Republican candidates' forum at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas this weekend, of how JEB! found the Lord, which was new to me, and somewhat surprising, given the well-known history of how he got married to a Catholic woman in 1974 and went to Mass with her for the next 21 years before finally being received into the Roman communion in 1995 (as he wrote in a piece for CNN on the eve of the Pope's visit to the US in September), because it sounds as if he was having a secret and, um, rather Baptist life the whole time:

Like the other candidates, Bush focused on his anti-abortion rights record and painted himself as a defender of religious liberty.  He opened up about a born-again moment he experienced in the '80s, when he decided to read the Bible from end to end.

I got about halfway through Romans when I realized that Jesus was my savior," he said. (CNN via)

(love how the defense of religious liberty is directly associated with the liberty to interfere with other people's possibly irreligious liberty), or,

Annals of derp: What goes up, etc.

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1872-77). Via JSS Gallery.

It's world-famous penitentiarist David Brooks out to stop all this nonsense he sees in the presidential campaign about ending the drug war as a way to deal with the problem of prison overcrowding:

The drug war is not even close to being the primary driver behind the sharp rise in incarceration. About 90 percent of America’s prisoners are held in state institutions. Only 17 percent of these inmates are in for a drug-related offense, or less than one in five.

Moreover, the share of people imprisoned for drug offenses is dropping sharply, down by 22 percent between 2006 and 2011. Writing in Slate, Leon Neyfakh emphasized that if you released every drug offender from state prison today, you’d reduce the population only to 1.2 million from 1.5 million.

The war on drugs does not explain the rocketing rates of incarceration, and ending that war, wise or not, will not solve this problem.

I think that the main thing Brooks is missing here is that the incarceration rates are not, in point of fact, rocketing, unless you're thinking about the way typical rockets, the ones that don't escape into space, take a parabolic trajectory in which after going up they go down, because US state incarceration rates have been going down for the past five years, since the annual number of admissions started declining around 2006, which is a good thing. That's not the problem our Democratic candidates are addressing.

A sour, overgeneralized, and intellectually sloppy sense of alienation

Edwin Levick, immigrants on Atlantic liner ca. 1906, Library of Congress, via Smithsonian Institution.

David Brooks writes ("The American Idea and Today's G.O.P.", New York Times, September 25 2015):

One of the exceptional things about American exceptionalism is the exceptionalism of American conservatism. While conservatives in other countries are essentially reactionary, yearning for an idealized past, American conservatives are retroactionary, afflicted with a nostalgia for an endlessly receding future. This goes back to the very beginnings, when those who settled, founded, and built America, not necessarily in that order, understood that our country had no history, and that only by forging a path into the future would we be able to acquire some.

Get happy! On the Edge of the World

What with the latest kerfuffle over Republican campaign music—Donald Trump somehow imagining he could have permission to use a song by Bernie Sanders supporter Neil Young—Scott Eric Kaufman at Salon has produced an elegant video history of conservative misappropriation of nonconservative musicians going back to the Reagan campaign's strange belief that Bruce Springsteen's 1984 anthem of despair "Born in the USA" could be used to articulate Reagan's message of sunny, childlike millionaire's greed, and wonders by the way if there's any popular music at all that's safe for Republicans to use.

Here's a suggestion for JEB!, anyhow, with a bright and optimistic message, traditional country club sound values, unifyingly bipartisan reference, and performers who might put up with it because of the high irony quotient:

Speaking of irony, Daniel Scotto at The Federalist (or as we call it here, with reference to its Patrick Henry–Jeff Davis ideology, The Confederalist) offers a remarkable piece of retroactionary music criticism demonstrating that "Born in the USA" is really an attack on the Obama presidency:

We have always been at war with Eastasia

Updated 5/30/2015

It's really not a secret! Map via Wikipedia.

Via NPR, the violent attack of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on US historians Pamela Crossley, Mark Elliot, James Millward, and others, for work published between 1997 and 2004 suggesting, in the trend known as the "new Qing history" that the Manchu empire of the Qing dynasty is not the same thing as China, the country it conquered in 1644 and occupied until 1912 along with other conquests such as Tibet, Mongolia, eastern Turkestan (now known as Xinjiang), and Taiwan.

Because such a view could give people the idea that Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan were not part of China before 1644 (they weren't) and that Tibetans, Uyghurs, and native Taiwanese are not eternally Chinese (they aren't), and indeed that there can be permanent Chinese communities in places (like Taiwan) that aren't China. Thus historian Li Zhiting writes (cited at the China Media Project, University of Hong Kong),

Annals of Derp: Down to Slavery

Paul Moreno's very remarkable argument in The Federalist, in which he claims that

[t]he gay-rights movement has followed not the trajectory of the anti-slavery movement, but of those who supported slavery

starts off not with gay rights or support for slavery, but with polygyny among the early Latter-Day Saints and its opponents:

At long last, Pam, have you no—Jeez, what am I thinking?

Joseph Welch addresses Senator McCarthy. Via FilmFanatic.

Just learned from Steven D at the Frogpond that the Da'esh has claimed "responsibility" for the bloody stupidity in Garland, Texas, at the Pamela Geller–sponsored, Geert Wilders–consecrated hatefest and "Cartoon Contest", where a couple of gunsels, at least one of them now reportedly well known to the FBI's counterterrorism operations, tried to shoot up the security outside the event and got themselves killed. I'm glad the guard appears not to have been badly hurt.

Whatever goal the Da'esh thinks it may have attained by this waste of time and its own adherents' lives, whether or not they actually had anything to do with it, or why they'd like to have the "credit", is unclear. It may be that for these conservatives as for our own the important thing is just to keep drawing that line between Them and Us.

Geller, of course, is thrilled, because her whole life at this point is drawing that same line and this is making her look like such a Serious person. Things couldn't have gone more according to plan:

Retroactionary justice

Via.

I would like to announce my intense disapproval of clever Judd Legum at TPM explaining how Prosecutor McCulloch did it wrong because hahahaha Antonin Scalia said so in United States v. Williams (1992):

It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.

And therefore there should have been no testimony from Darren Wilson or evidence suggesting his innocence.

Scalia's ruling in that case was pernicious and an invitation to prosecutorial misconduct and historically wrong. As Justice Stevens explained.

It's Retroactionary Tuesday!

Updated 10/15/2014

Image by The Daily What, via Slashfilm.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Sorting Election", New York Times, 14 October 2014:

I mean which do you prefer, the Bay Area and the quaint old backward-looking, high-regulation, walkable-neighborhood broccoli information economy of the 1990s, or Houston and the hot new forward-driving, petroleum-stained, big-freedom raw-meat energy economy of the 1980s? The country's big enough for the both of them, right?

He's in his highest-gloss nonpartisan just-sayin' mode today, calling forth wonderful peals of invective from Driftglass, who can be driven very nearly insane by that "who, me, conservative? Why I'm just an innocent bystander" pose, and the faux-barbaric yawp coming from someone who until recently believed Applebee's had a salad bar:

Saturday cheap shot: Roots of D'Souza's Rage

Update 9/24/2014:

I guess in the light of Dinesh D'Souza's sentencing (eight months in community confinement sounds like he's having a baby), this old piece has unexpectedly started getting a lot of hits, and I wanted to clarify what it is: a pretty strict parody of D'Souza's Washington Post piece on President Obama from October 2010, linked in the first line. Nice to see you all, come back soon!

D'Souza and onetime colonialist girlfriend Ann Coulter

If you want to understand what is going on in the conservative movement today, you have to begin with Dinesh D'Souza. No, not the Dinesh D'Souza who's just been indicted for laundering $20,000 in campaign funds to a senatorial candidate who had no chance whatever of winning; I mean Dinesh D'Souza, the postmodernist cultural critic noted for the memorable hypothesis that President Obama is in some sense genetically conditioned to act out the beliefs of the 1950s Mau Mau movement. Oh wait, they're the same person. Ironically, the forces that transformed a polite and earnest but clever Bombay boy into a low-rent American political criminal are virtually an exact mirror image of the Obama story that he imagined in his 2010 effusion in Forbes.

How do I know this? Because I use Google. I learned that he suffered from a fear of people knowing too much about his life—

Retroactionary Watch: Cruzin'

Still-Canadian* Senator Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz Faces the Nation (via PoliticusUSA):

Well, Bob, with all due respect, I don’t agree with the premise of your question. Throughout the government shutdown, I opposed a government shutdown. I said we shouldn’t shut down the government. I think it was a mistake that President Obama and the Democrats shut the government down this fall.

Star chamber

Ceiling of the Star Chamber, Palace of Westminster. The decoration is said to be the reason for the room's name.

Human rights attorney Jesselyn Radack is a hero, but she is an attorney, and she's using some loaded attorney language here:

US notifies defendant it'll use secret evidence. This is like the Star Chamber. Hope #SCOTUS rules unconstitutional. http://t.co/zrzPItjeJH
— Jesselyn Radack (@JesselynRadack) October 26, 2013

What exactly do you mean by "this", Counsel? I would say it is more precisely like the end of the Star Chamber. Because when Charles I was using the Court of Star Chamber in the 1630s to punish Puritan subversives he was definitely using techniques familiar to victims of [jump]

No, wait, this explains everything! Retroactionism revisited

Rep. Morgan Griffith doing his Eric Cantor imitation, in full revolutionary snarl mode. Love the chin whiskers showing that he's not just an oik but a  pretentious oik.

One Republican congressman who is fully aware of the suffering that is being caused by the federal shutdown and will be caused by any default on the country's financial obligations is second-term Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia. But he hastens to clarify, with a Leninesque grandeur, that those are just the eggs you need to break for this particular omelette:

“We have to make a decision that’s right long-term for the United States, and what may be distasteful, unpleasant and not appropriate in the short run may be something that has to be done,” he said. Griffith, a former majority leader of the Virginia House of Delegates, cited as an example the American Revolution. [jump]

Cheap shots, hot shots, screen shots

I'm not even going to try to explain what I was doing on the above web page except to say that it was a totally legitimate part of my job, for which I get sort of paid, unlike these Blogspot effusions, to find out something about one of the Xu Xiaoping award winners  (I was actually trying to find out where a particular essay had been published, not whether it got a prize).  But I loved the somehow Russian pathos of that banner ad.

Mark Halperin below the fold, and much, much more!

Cheap shots and resting-face issues

Hanging out at #OKCupid:

"I'm a true gentleman! Shivery is not dead it's just not used as much anymore." #OKCupid Oh My God. I need to stop. Crying so hard.
— Ms. Entropy (@MsEntropy) July 11, 2013

Via.

[jump]

Retroactionary watch: Tehran

Peter Hart at FAIR catches Time magazine discovering that Iran's march toward nuclear supremacy has taken a retroactionary direction:

Nowhere does Time's Massimo Calabresi mention one rather inconvenient fact: There is no evidence that Iran is actually pursuing a nuclear weapon. Regular inspections have failed to turn up any evidence of that. Instead, we read things like this: "Iran itself has slowed down its efforts, converting some enriched uranium to a form that can be used only in research, not in weapons." This is treated as evidence that Iran is heading towards its nuclear weapons more slowly.

Yes, Iran has slowed to the point where they're actually going backward—making progress in reverse. The fiends! At this rate, they should be able to construct a working weapon by 2009 or so, and there will be no way we can stop them!

Photo by Rick Steves.