Mental equipment in Egypt

Image via Rocco Marc McDonald.

Via Twitter account of the great Lyse Doucet:

I think we should stop worrying about Egypt right now.

Looks premeditated to me

Image by LASTOChkin at DeviantArt. Don't know if the styling of the nym should be called capital (majuscule) PUNishment because I don't see the pun.

[Missouri Attorney General] Koster dismissed concerns over the cruelty of reviving the gas chamber in an exchange with The Associated Press, saying, “The premeditated murder of an innocent Missourian is cruel and unusual punishment. The lawful implementation of the death penalty, following a fair and reasoned jury trial, is not.” (via ThinkProgress)

Because no innocent person could ever be executed in Missouri. Except once in a while. Like if they miss a deadline, which shows bad moral character.

And is the gas chamber crueler than Dr. Doerhoff?

The doctor testified anonymously that he is dyslexic. That he sometimes confused names of drugs. That he sometimes gave inconsistent testimony. That the injection protocol was not written down, and that he made changes on his “independent authority.”

And that turns out not to be all. The Post-Dispatch has confirmed the man behind the screen was Dr. Alan R. Doerhoff, 62, of Jefferson City. Two Missouri hospitals won’t allow him to practice within their walls. He has been sued for malpractice more than 20 times, by his own estimate, and was publicly reprimanded in 2003 by the state Board of Healing Arts for failing to disclose malpractice suits to a hospital where he was treating patients. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Lethal Injection)

Brooks: Mental equipment

David Brooks writes:

The debate on Egypt—I mean the debate in Washington, obviously, not anything they're talking about in Egypt, which could hardly be of an intellectual heft to interest my readers—is essentially between two different worldviews: those who believe in constitutional government and those who hate Muslims.

Constitutionalists say the main thing is that there is a constitution and that there has been an election* and that the government has the support of the people, as has been confirmed over and over.** Democratic institutions and the rule of law are tender plants that need loving care, indirect sunlight. Give them too much coup*** and they could drown.

*Although in point of fact the election (May 2012 for Parliament, June for the presidency) wasn't under the constitution (the following December).
**A poll last March found 82% in favor of the return of the military to power!
*** [sic]. Brooks seems to have decided that coup is a mass noun: "those who would destroy them through armed coup".

"O my brother! How are the poll numbers?"

[jump]

Great Spirit

I've long been skeptical of Johnny Depp's acting method and its dependence on hair, but I think I'm going to like The Lone Ranger, if objections to the film from the Christianist community have any foundation:

In an interview with The Christian Post, Dr. Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Coalition and Editor-in-Chief of Movieguide, attacked the film's "strong mixed pagan, revisionist, politically correct worldview."

"The government is bad – the army is killing Indians – the bad guy is a businessman, the military-industrial complex is bad," he explained, finishing the list with a notable exception – "the Christians are not always bad."

Nevertheless, "the pagan elements triumph because you're looking at it from Tanto's point of view." He used "pagan" as a generic term for non-Christian, unidentified spirituality. "It's not Buddhism, it's not Hinduism, it's a mishmash." (Christian Post, via Raw Story)

That's so typically liberal, focusing on the government killing Indians and not saying a word about the tax breaks Indians got. But Dr. Baehr is a little P.C. himself, changing our noble friend's name from the offensive Tonto (Spanish for "fool") to the mystifying Tanto ("so much" in Italian?).

Cheap shots: Trolls are us

Image from The J Stands for Awesome.

Whatever energy I normally devote to the weekly Friday morning compilation on this page seems to have been diverted into the Twitter machine this week, I don't know exactly why. Moreover, my following on the Twitter is so tiny as to be undetectable with the naked eye, so the chances of your having seen any of these gems are slim. So here is a little anthology.

@Jezebel It's on the principle that the best defense is the most offensive. Bad, but then the alternative is proving Zimmerman is innocent.
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 27, 2013

Aspen: Davos for the innumerate. http://t.co/km21RDXUqU
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 29, 2013

[jump]

Stop and Frisk the Flowers

Times, June 29:

“They just keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group,’ ” [Mayor Bloomberg] said dismissively of the practice’s critics. “That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”

He added: “It’s exactly the reverse of what they say. I don’t know where they went to school, but they didn’t take a math course. Or a logic course.”

Every time he says "disproportionate", which is a disproportionate amount of the time, he skips its second syllable, which makes me crazy. Also, the problem with illegal racial profiling is that there are reasons for its being illegal, not that it isn't being done thoroughly enough. But most of all, I don't know where the mayor went to school (obviously I could find out in about ten seconds), but he needs a little math and/or logic refresher himself, as we see in the

Times, July 2:

Mr. Bloomberg has often credited stop-and-frisk with bringing the murder rate to an all-time low. But if crime and street stops were strongly related, the murder rate would have gone up last year, when stops went down by about 20 percent.

Welcome to the working class, Greg

Image via Steve Lovelace.

We were speculating about whether bold defender of the 1% Gregory Mankiw actually belongs to the 1%. Looks like the answer may be yes and no. Krugman, via Atrios:

Cengage Learning Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection more than five years after a buyout led by Apax Partners LLP left the textbook publisher with about $5.8 billion in debt.
…
Greg Mankiw, a Harvard University professor who advised Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is owed $1.6 million in royalties, according to the bankruptcy filing.

Leaders--can't live with 'em...

Via really insane winger site.

Timothy Lee in the Washington Post gets to something really important:

Debates over government transparency are usually framed as a contest between the executive branch and the rest of us. Transparency is supposed to help Congress, the courts and the public hold the president accountable.

But history suggests that transparency is important for another reason: it helps the president himself keep control over his subordinates.

Whatever is going on at DHS and DOJ and their agencies is undoubtedly worse than Obama intends it to be, more evil and more inept; and whatever lies he and Father Brennan tell about it are meant to conceal not so much the activities themselves as Obama's inability to stop or mitigate them. Gods forbid he should look weak!

That's why we need to have his back and not let him get away with stuff at the same time. Leaders are like teenagers. I love my son to death, but I don't trust him more than about ten feet.

In other revolutionary news:

Turkish court orders halt to redevelopment of #TaksimGeziPark http://t.co/fOzy8YaQdP
— Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallStNYC) July 4, 2013

Freedom!!!

Gezi Park June 2007. Photo by Robokow. Wikimedia Commons.

Bill and Coup

I swear that guy has a vuvuzela! Image by AP? via Channel 11 Atlanta.

Somebody I follow sent a Tweet around asking if there's ever been a good coup, or words to that effect, and I had one of those tip-of-the-tongue experiences: wasn't there... um... But I couldn't drag it out of the memory hole.

Until a couple of hours later, carrying some groceries through the rain, when it came to me: Egypt, back at the beginning in early 2011, when the military ultimately seemed serious about getting out of the business. No wonder I couldn't remember; the thesis seemed to be rewriting itself all day.

They were never serious to the point where you couldn't doubt it. They seemed to be particularly frightened of Morsi and anxious to undercut him any way they could: running him against a single "conservative" (Mubarak relic) candidate, dumping their own constitution on him. But Morsi invariably defeated them and they accepted their defeat fairly graciously.

This is a little of what folks always call "just semantics" (unless they're familiar with professional practice in that field, it which case they might call it "quibbling about words"), but since it's apparently a problem for the US State Department to know whether it's a coup or not, could we say it's just the Revolution, with the role of the army being to make a perimeter within which the real conversation can happen?

Officer says army is leaving, says they were there for protection but were unwanted. Cheering. pic.twitter.com/JZTYMilNKX
— Kareem Fahim (@kfahim) July 3, 2013

What a great motto for a military that would be!

Tales of the Vienna Woods

Via Geeks of Doom.

Why do you suppose the NSA didn't know whether young Mr. Snowden was on President Morales's plane or not? Don't they know everything? Have those fiendishly clever Bolivians come up with some technique for defeating American omniscience?

Apparently (thanks to Wyden and Udall, via Emptywheel) all the cool hardware just doesn't work very well.

We are quite familiar with the bulk email records collection program that operated under the USA Patriot Act and has now been confirmed by senior intelligence officials. We were very concerned about this program’s impact on Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights, and we spent a significant portion of 2011 pressing intelligence officials to provide evidence of its effectiveness. They were unable to do so, and the program was shut down that year....

intelligence agencies’ assessments of the usefulness of particular collection programs – even significant ones – are not always accurate. This experience has also led us to be skeptical of claims about the value of the bulk phone records collection program in particular.

Who could have suspected?

Gettysburg addressed

It's the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg today, and by one of those amazing coincidences a book about the battle just dropped into David Brooks's Kindle. It's got tons of quotes from letters by the soldiers, so a column ought to virtually write itself.

Unfortunately Allen Guelzo's new Gettysburg: The Last Invasion turns out to be kind of negative. Some of the things it has to say about the soldiers are really not very nice. Much better to turn to James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, from 1998, which explains that the warriors were motivated by

“patriotism, ideology, concepts of duty, honor, manhood and community.” The soldiers were intensely political. Newspapers were desperately sought after in camp. Between battles, several regiments held formal debates on subjects like the constitutional issues raised by the war. “Ideological motifs almost leap from many pages of these documents,” McPherson reports. “It is government against anarchy, law against disorder,” a Philadelphia printer wrote, explaining his desire to fight. [jump]

Image from Petey and Petunia.

Scare Quotes Alert

New York Times:

Egypt entered a perilous 48 hours on Monday when the military delivered an ultimatum to the country’s first democratically elected president, hundreds of thousands of protesters renewed calls to oust him from office and the president’s Islamists allies vowed to take to the streets to stop what they called “a military coup.”

Sorry, that's not a "military coup", that's a military coup. I'm not even condemning it, I just think it needs to be called by the right name.

The whole thing is pretty sad. It would have been so nice if Morsi had been able to succeed, in some degree, in establishing a general comfort level with constitutionality, and I thought Muslim Brothers' experience in providing social services would help. Power, as usual, corrupted. The MB insistence on writing the constitution on their own wasn't a good thing; they could have had a more Westminstery system, with some built-in instability, which makes it easier to get rid of an obnoxious Leader without tearing down the entire system, but that would have meant leaving doors open for all sorts of little parties.

As I always say with reference to Egypt it's up to the liberals, once again, to give the poor and struggling majority some reason to vote for them. Last time they were too involved with white-girl problems; maybe this time the visible presence of the People in the protests will make a difference.

Photo by AP via Huffington Post.

Alt.Snowden

Image via Pastor Chris Owens.

Woke up with an alternative narrative designed—I'll be up front about this—to maintain my preconceptions intact, to keep my eyes jaundiced in the way they were before: the Le Carré version, in which the young and caring are abused by the careerist game-players.

1. The question about Greenwald isn't, Is he a journalist? It's, Since when did he become a reporter? Of course he's a journalist if he wants to be, and a very skilled one in many ways, but what he wants to be is a journalist in a movie, with the international intrigue and romance, dead drops and car chases, vast plutocrat conspiracies swirling around him: he wants to be a kind of public spook, running his joes in the public eye.

2. The question about Snowden is, How did somebody so smart get to be so stupid? Why does he act like a brave and silly 16-year-old, happy to go to jail for the sake of suffering humanity until they tell him he can't take his laptop with him? Why does he think somebody's self-serving PowerPoint presentation is a literal representation of the truth? Why does he think the Chinese government in Hong Kong or the Russian government at Sheremetyevo would be spying on him less than the NSA in Honolulu? Well, that's libertarianism for you—delay in growing out of adolescent solipsism.

3. The question about Obama is, How cynical is he? I can't digest the picture of Obama talking like a hippie to make everybody vote for him while he's really Nixon in his heart, because talking like a hippie to make everybody vote for you doesn't work. Just ask President Kucinich. I think the right is halfway right about Obama: he's a socialist, but a real Fabian, building it 50 years from now and unable to brook criticism from the left precisely because we're the ones who ought to understand that it can't be done any faster. (But Mr. P, you're really not giving us much to work with on the security side of the picture.)

In this story, Snowden has been used, his yearning to be a hero, his techie cleverness, his relaxed and reassuring presence. It was a crappy, undercooked plan. The information it collected wasn't all that devastating, merely evidence of what everybody already knew (however shocked-shocked the diplomatic world may be); and it left poor Edward under the bus. I like him—he reminds my of my own 16-year-old, actually—like I like Bradley Manning, but I think Greenwald, and Assange, are a little bit careless.

Martha Vickers as Daisy in George Cukor's imaginary film of The Great Gatsby.

In this Corner and punch drunk

Members of the Gang of Eight, in C.C.W.'s fevered imagination.

Mr. Charles C.W. (Country Western) Cooke in this Corner:

1.  the Gang of Eight’s bill is far-reaching — “comprehensive,” if you will — and it quietly and radically changes the legal immigration regime as well. 
2. [quoting Mr. Hinderaker]  Instead of reforming our Ted Kennedy-inspired, irrational 60s-era immigration regime, it perpetuates it and even makes it worse.
3. This is exactly what it does, once again eschewing merit-based immigration for a family-based system and privileging low-skilled immigration uber alles.

Plus ça ne change pas, the more radically different it is?

Hutzpah!

From "Red Alert Politics":

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor joined Republican and conservative interns and college students on the Senate side of the Capitol steps on Friday to protest the anticipated doubling of federally subsidized student loan interest rates. Rates will revert back to pre-2008 levels, jumping from 3.4 percent back to 6.8 percent, unless Congress takes action....

“A few weeks ago, the House of Representatives did the right thing — it acted,” Cantor said as he addressed the students. ”It said that students of this country have a right to a quality education and they shouldn’t be burdened by ever spiraling rates on their student loans.”

Sadly, no, as a great blogger once said. It said that if you thought Republicans would prefer for people who need to take out loans not to go to college, you'd be right. The bill the House passed last May specifically called for spiraling interest rates:

The House bill would allow student lending rates to reset each year, based on the interest rate of a 10-year Treasury note, plus 2.5 percentage points for Stafford loans. The Congressional Budget Office projected that rates on Stafford loans would rise to 5 percent in 2014 and 7.7 percent in 2023. 

Obama and the Senate have much more swallowable proposals, where at least the rate wouldn't be going up every year like one of those nightmare adustable-rate housing mortgages of way back in, um, 2007, but the House under Cantor's leadership ("leadership" would be too strong a word for Boehner's role in the shop) won't look at them. Instead, Cantor prefers to go before the cameras to pretend he actually cares. What a thug.

Blonde Eric Cantor.

Nickeling and Diming department

Have you heard of this? Hourly-paid workers are now getting their pay in the form of stored-value cards.

But in the overwhelming majority of cases, using the card involves a fee. And those fees can quickly add up: one provider, for example, charges $1.75 to make a withdrawal from most A.T.M.’s, $2.95 for a paper statement and $6 to replace a card. Some users even have to pay $7 inactivity fees for not using their cards....

These fees can take such a big bite out of paychecks that some employees end up making less than the minimum wage once the charges are taken into account....Devonte Yates, 21, who earns $7.25 an hour working a drive-through station at a McDonald’s in Milwaukee, says he spends $40 to $50 a month on fees associated with his JPMorgan Chase payroll card. 

Banks are really the new Mafia, shaking down everybody that doesn't have a protector. And protecting guess who?

Taco Bell, Walgreen and Walmart are among the dozens of well-known companies that offer prepaid cards to their workers; the cards are particularly popular with retailers and restaurants... a calculator on Visa’s Web site estimates that a company with 500 workers could save $21,000 a year by switching from checks to payroll cards.

Nice little wage you're getting. Wouldn't like to see anything happen to it... Image via philosecurity (and another article about bankster shakedowns).

Derp Farmer

Preposterously stupid Texas governor Rick Perry (via Maddowblog):

"[E]ven the woman who filibustered the Senate the other day was born into difficult circumstances. She was the daughter of a single woman, she was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas senate. It's just unfortunate that she hasn't learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters."

I.e.,  I'm saddened that Wendy Davis hasn't learned from her relevant life experience what I know to be true based on no experience whatever and repeating the same sentences over and over again.

Image from The Meta Picture.

The Mongrel Horde

I'm having some trouble getting a grip on David Brooks's point today.

Over the past few decades, American society has been transformed in a fit of absence of mind.

Perhaps he means into a fit of absence of mind. No? [jump]

Tyrone Power in Sign of Zorro, 1940. Via Patchary's Blog.

Cheap shots 6/28/2013: Jesus laughed

Uncredited image via Ellen Haroutunian.

Stolen from Dr. Turk:

How bad are Samuel Alito's manners?

So bad even Dana Milbank can't come up with an example of how both sides do it. That's historic.

Incidentally, Ann Althouse (via Thers) explains that Alito's not actually being rude, just Italian-American: [jump]

More on metadata

Image from Quicklabel.

Greenwald via Raw Story:

The Bush email metadata program had restrictions on the scope of the bulk email records the NSA could analyze. Those restrictions are detailed in a legal memorandum written in a 27 November 2007, by assistant attorney general Kenneth Weinstein to his new boss, attorney general Michael Mukasey, who had taken office just a few weeks earlier.

The purpose of that memorandum was to advise Mukasey of the Pentagon’s view that these restrictions were excessive, and to obtain permission for the NSA to expand its “contact chains” deeper into Americans’ email records. The agency, the memo noted, already had “in its databases a large amount of communications metadata associated with persons in the United States”.

But, Wainstein continued, “NSA’s present practice is to ‘stop’ when a chain hits a telephone number or [internet] address believed to be used by a United States person.”

Wainstein told Mukasey that giving NSA broader leeway to study Americans’ online habits would give the surveillance agency, ironically, greater visibility into the online habits of foreigners – NSA’s original mandate.

“NSA believes that it is over-identifying numbers and addresses that belong to United States persons and that modifying its practice to chain through all telephone numbers and addresses, including those reasonably believed to be used by a United States person,” Weinstein wrote, “will yield valuable foreign intelligence information primarily concerning non-United States persons outside the United States.”

"Ironically" is the wrong word there; better would be "paradoxically". I've tried to explain this before with reference to the story about Chicago police practice. The original NSA method was a "profiling" approach which tried to limit its data by marking all the "foreign" numbers first, and it dredged up too many dolphins along with its tuna, so to speak. The method they decided to replace it with was a "network" approach, throwing each dolphin back into the water as it came up on the way to the next tuna. It's paradoxical that starting with fewer limitations should get more narrowly tailored results, but it's true.