democracy and liberty

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.

Benjamin Franklin,
1759

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off with his head!

McCain Loses His Head

 

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”

To read the Journal’s details about the depths of McCain’s shallowness on the subject of Cox’s chairmanship, see “McCain’s Scapegoat” (Sept. 19). Then consider McCain’s characteristic accusation that Cox “has betrayed the public’s trust.”

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain’s fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for “dynamic scoring” that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain’s smear — that Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people. McCain’s Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17; and the New York Times of Sept. 19.)

By a Gresham’s Law of political discourse, McCain’s Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a “dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions.” This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain’s campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors “massive government, billions in spending increases.”

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain’s party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On “60 Minutes” Sunday evening, McCain, saying “this may sound a little unusual,” said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has “respect” and “prestige” and could “lend some bipartisanship.” Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

georgewill@washpost.com

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possibe veeps

 

Veep Candidates from the Senate

 

Here is my list of possible female Democratic senators (in alphabetical order).

• Barbara Boxer (D-CA) as Veep would make the progressives within the Democratic party jump for joy. She is a real firebrand, but the Republicans would instantly attack the ticket as a couple of left-wing crazies. Furthermore she is from California, a state the Democrats don’t need any help with. One state where she might help is Florida. Would all the little old (Jewish) ladies in Broward county who are basically Democrats but lukewarm to Obama vote against a ticket with a Jewish woman on it? She could help in Florida, but she is too easy to caricature as a leftist.
• Hillary Clinton (D-NY) She got 18 million votes in the primaries.  She will attract women voters.  Others will vote against the ticket simply because of her.  She won’t likely bring in any Republican votes, or a state that is leaning Republican.  She knows something about policy and governing and is a plausible commander-in-chief.  She wants the job.
• Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has only been in the Senate 2 years but has a long history in state politics. At 54 she brings experience to the ticket. Her biggest asset is being from the mother of all swing states, Missouri, with its 11 electoral votes. Furthermore, Missouri’s northern neighbor, Iowa has 7 electoral votes and went for Bush in 2004. If she could bring in those 18 electoral votes, when added to the 252 Kerry got, we have 270 and she becomes Vice President of the United States. This calculation has surely not escaped Axelrod’s attention. She’s also a Catholic, which helps with a demographic where Obama has had problems. Definitely a sleeper.
• Patty Murray (D-WA) is 57, Catholic and has been in the Senate 16 years. She voted against going to war with Iraq, which makes her ideologically compatible with Obama on this score. She refers to herself as a mom in tennis shoes. A drawback is that Washington is not a swing state.

Here is my list of possible male Democratic senators (in alphabetical order).

• Evan Bayh (D-IN) is a young guy (52) and has been elected governor and senator by huge margins. He might be able to bring in the state for Obama and could be helpful in other midwestern states like Missouri and Iowa. He also supported Clinton, which would help mollify her supporters. His father was a long-time influential senator. A name to remember.

 

• Bill Nelson (D-FL) would certainly put Florida in play. That alone might be reason to choose him. There is no conceivable way McCain could get 270 electoral votes without Florida. McCain could cancel Nelson by putting Florida governor Charlie Crist on his ticket though.

 

• Jim Webb (D-VA) is the most likely senator to get the nod. At 62 he is experienced but still young enough to call McCain an old man. He is extremely outspoken and would be the world’s fiercest attack dog. As a decorated Marine in Vietnam he matches McCain on the military service score, but unlike McCain, he has held an executive position in the military: he was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy. As a former Republican and military hero, he will attract many of the independents and moderate Republicans McCain desperately needs. he also might be able to bring in Virginia, with its 13 electoral votes. He is actively campaigning for the job already, by traveling around the country praising Obama and attacking McCain, to demonstrate his stuff. He has written a number of bestselling war novels that have been widely praised as giving a real feeling of what war is like from the soldiers’ point of view. A minus for Webb is that he has as many marriages under his belt as Rudy Giuliani, the reigning indoor marriage champion. If he became Veep, Gov. Tim Kaine (D-VA) would appoint a Democrat to succeed him, possibly Kaine himself.

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attorney general criticizes supreme court; military trials proceed

Mukasey: Detainee ruling won’t stop terror trials

Attorney general criticizes Supreme Court’s Guantanamo ruling, says won’t halt military trials

MARK SHERMAN
AP News

Jun 13, 2008

The Supreme Court’s decision on Guantanamo Bay will unleash a torrent of court filings from detainees seeking their freedom but won’t affect the military trials planned for some terrorism suspects, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Friday.

The Bush administration disagrees strongly with the high court’s decision that the foreigners held under indefinite detention at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba have the right to seek release in civilian court. President Bush said Thursday he would abide by the decision, but also said his administration was evaluating whether to respond to the court’s ruling with new legislation.

In Brussels, Belgium, on Friday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he would reserve judgment on “what we ought to do next” at Guantanamo until he received briefings on the ruling.

“I have often said that … we would like to close Guantanamo,” Gates said. “I think that despite the fact that in many respects Guantanamo has become a state-of-the-art prison now, early reports of abuses and so on unquestionably were a black eye for the United States.”

Thursday’s much-anticipated 5-to-4 ruling was the third time the justices have repudiated Bush on his ambitious and hugely controversial schemes to hold the suspects outside the protections of U.S. law.

Speaking at a Group of Eight meeting of justice and home affairs ministers in Tokyo, Mukasey said, “I’m disappointed with the decision, in so far as I understand that it will result in hundreds of actions challenging the detention of enemy combatants to be moved to federal district court.”

He added: “I think it bears emphasis that the court’s decision does not concern military commission trials, which will continue to proceed. Instead it addresses the procedures that the Congress and the president put in place to permit enemy combatants to challenge their detention.”

He said the Justice Department would comply with the ruling while studying the decision and “whether any legislation or any other action may be appropriate.”

So far, 19 of the detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other alleged Sept. 11 plotters, are facing military war crimes trials. The Pentagon has said it plans to try as many as 80 of the roughly 270 men held at Guantanamo.

But the lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s one-time driver, said he will seek dismissal of the charges against Hamdan based on the new ruling. A military judge had already delayed the trial’s start to await the high court’s decision.

“The entire legal framework under which Mr. Hamdan was to be tried has been turned on its head,” said his lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer.

It was unclear whether a hearing at Guantanamo for Canadian Omar Khadr, charged with killing a U.S. Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan, would go forward next week as planned.

Charles Swift, the former Navy lawyer who used to represent Hamdan, said he believes the court removed any legal basis for keeping the Guantanamo facility open and that the military tribunals are “doomed.”

Guantanamo generally and the tribunals were conceived on the idea that “constitutional protections wouldn’t apply,” Swift said. “The court said the Constitution applies. They’re in big trouble.”

In writing for the court majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged the terrorism threat the country faces — the administration’s justification for the detentions — but he declared, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

In a blistering dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said the decision “will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

Bush has argued the detentions are needed to protect the nation in a time of unprecedented threats from al-Qaida and other foreign terrorist groups. The president, in Rome on Thursday, said, “It was a deeply divided court, and I strongly agree with those who dissented.” Kennedy said federal judges could ultimately order some detainees to be released, but he also said such orders would depend on security concerns and other circumstances. The ruling itself won’t result in any immediate releases.

Lawyers for detainees differed over whether the ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for those who have not been charged. Of the roughly 270 men remaining at the prison, most are classed as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Some detainee lawyers said hearings could take place within a few months. But James Cohen, a Fordham University law professor who has two clients at Guantanamo, predicted Bush would continue seeking ways to resist the ruling. “Nothing is going to happen between June 12 and Jan. 20,” when the next president takes office, Cohen said.

Roughly 200 detainees have lawsuits on hold in federal court in Washington. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he would call a special meeting of federal judges to address how to handle the cases. Detainees already facing trial are in a different category.

Human rights groups and many Democratic members of Congress celebrated the ruling as affirming the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. Several Republican lawmakers called it a decision that put foreign terrorists’ rights above the safety of the American people.

The administration opened the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to hold enemy combatants, people suspected of ties to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

At its heart, the 70-page ruling says that the detainees have the same rights as anyone else in custody in the United States to contest their detention before a judge. Kennedy also said the system the administration has put in place to classify detainees as enemy combatants and review those decisions is not an adequate substitute for the right to go before a civilian judge.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his own dissent, criticized the majority for striking down what he called “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.”

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas also dissented.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens — the court’s more liberal members — joined Kennedy to form the majority.

The court has ruled twice previously that people held at Guantanamo without charges can go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention. Each time, the administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to try to close the courthouse doors to the detainees.

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so we don’t forget and have to repeat it

For all those sensible people infuriated by the claims that Hitler was an atheist…(source)

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looking for a god to get you elected

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tribalism and political violence

Kenya stokes tribalism debate

By Mark Doyle BBC world affairs correspondent World headlines on Kenya appear to say it all.“Tribal violence spirals in Kenya,” screams the front page banner in the International Herald Tribune. “Kenya plunges into interethnic violence,” says Le Monde. But headlines can be misleading. It is certainly true that the post-electoral violence in Kenya has taken on a tribal character. Members of the incumbent (and controversially re-installed) President Mwai Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe have been pitted against other smaller tribes. Thousands of people have fled their homes But that is only part of the story. A more complete headline might be: “Tribal differences in Kenya, normally accepted peacefully, are exploited by politicians hungry for power who can manipulate poverty-stricken population.” But headlines are not really headlines when they are written like that – and few would criticise the international newspapers for their pithy style. The ethnic and political violence in Kenya has renewed debate about whether multi-party democracy can be successful in an African context where ethnic loyalties are strong. See Kenya’s ethnic divisions by province If you ask almost any African this question the answer will be qualified: “Yes, democracy can work… if only our leaders allowed it.” Horror as church burned Rwanda fears propel West Q&A: Poll violence It would be naive in the extreme to discount ethnicity in any African election. The reality of life on the world’s poorest continent is that most people live a marginal economic existence and rely enormously, for survival, on those nearest to them. Rural villagers rely on each other, for example, to bring in the crop, or to share food in difficult times. Urban dwellers often organise themselves to provide common services like schools because their governments are either too poor or too incompetent to deliver. In these circumstances the people nearest to you – whom you can trust – are first, family, and second, tribe. African politicians know this formula very well and many of them exploit it ruthlessly. “Vote for me,” they say, “because I’m from your tribe and you can trust me.” Unemployed young men The most dramatic recent illustration of this kind of manipulation was the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Much of Kenya’s tribalism is fuelled by land disputes Hutus were persuaded by an extremist Hutu power bloc that all Tutsis were their enemies. There are many other less catastrophic examples. Politics in Nigeria, for example, is a complex chessboard of ethnicity and religion. The presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006 divided the country along ethnic and linguistic lines. And even in a peaceful, democratic country like Ghana, it is clear that ethnic Ashantis, for example, tend to vote one way while ethnic Ewes tend to vote another. But at the same time there is usually a further explanation – beyond ethnic group – for the way people vote or the way they react to situations like the current crisis in Kenya. That explanation is almost always rooted in money – or a lack of it – and the cynical search for power by politicians. It is no coincidence that the people who usually perpetrate “tribal violence” are unemployed young men. In Ivory Coast in the late 1990s, for example, the campaign against northerners that was orchestrated by southern politicians – and which eventually led to a full-scale civil war – was spearheaded by youths in the main city, Abidjan, who were paid a daily rate for the job. ‘Land grabs’ Equally, in the Kenyan case, it is no coincidence that some of the worst violence has been in the Rift Valley area. The region has a history of land disputes. Most African nations now have an elected government Some of those disputes were originally caused by what was coyly called European “settlement” – which created refugees hungry for land. More recently, Kenyan politicians have practised more honestly named “land grabs” in parts of the country. African intellectuals who concede there is a problem of tribalism on the continent – or, rather, a problem of the deliberate manipulation of tribal sentiment by selfish politicians – stress that there is also a rational solution. Part of the solution, they say, is economic development. If there is growth in the economy there will be more education and less ignorance about fellow citizens of other tribes – and, of course, fewer unemployed thugs for politicians to “buy” for a few cents a day. Another part of the solution, they say, is genuine democracy with genuinely independent law courts. People would have no need to rely on their tribe – apart from culturally, should they so wish – if they could rely on all their ballot papers being counted, and could expect honest judgements from courts. Here, Africa can point to progress in recent decades. Fifty years ago, almost the entire continent was ruled by foreign colonial powers. Even just 20 years ago, most African countries were run by dictators or military juntas. Now, thanks to pro-democracy activists, most African nations have an elected government. Good start Many of those governments are far from perfect. But the advent of at least some democracy – assisted by relatively cheap technology such as FM radio stations and mobile phones which can spread information easily – has encouraged what seems to be an irreversible cultural sea-change in African attitudes to those in power. Put bluntly, that change means that people can no longer be comprehensively fooled or dictated to. It is still possible for politicians to cheat at elections – for example through the vehicle of ethnicity. But the new freedoms, coupled with the new technology, make it almost impossible for politicians to do this without people knowing what is going on. That is a good start, African intellectuals say, and it may one day mean the end of negative tribalism. Meanwhile, of course, those headlines will remain at least half true. KENYA’S ETHNIC GROUPS Population 34.5m, comprising more than 40 ethnic groups Kikuyu are the largest tribe, mostly concentrated around Nairobi Most of Eastern/ North-eastern regions sparsely populated with ethnic Somalis Main ethnic groups are: Kikuyu: 22% Luhya: 14% Luo: 13% Kalenjin: 12% Kamba: 11% Kisii: 6% Meru: 6% Other African: 15%

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