The Assassination Smear 2

I agree with a lot of what Noah said in a comment to my Assassination Smear post and just want to highlight and clarify some of it, and disagree with some it. I didn't excerpt all of his comments, so read it there. You can check out Noah's progressive blog here.

I would really like to think this [Obama assassination] isn't a possibility, but that would be naïve – it's all good to be wary of security risks.
Yes, increasing security was the right decision, due to the crowds attracted by Obama's candidacy. But not only bloggers and media, but people at the water cooler are getting a little carried away with saying Obama is going to get assassinated. I can't trace any of the "assassination smear" to the Hillary campaign, although the first draft of my post tried to (water cooler types excepted) until I edited it.

I feel as though Brunstein was not referring to mainstream society.
I'm not sure I implied otherwise. There is always going to some nut out there outside the mainstream, but I think whether "decency and reconciliation" is going to be the last straw for that nut is an open question. I wasn't sure Benazir Bhutto needed to be dragged into this conversation, either.

The chances of Hillary accepting the VP slot is extremely slim, in my mind. I have a post of my blog about this.

Don't you think she would like to be a Dick Cheney style puppetmaster? ;)

I really doubt the upper-Clinton campaign is really trying to smear Obama based off of that incredibly stupid Muslim "argument"

Really? She sure is milking the religious-guilt-by-association card for all its worth in the case of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, so it would seem to be in character.

(what's wrong with having Islam as your faith, anyway?).
Nothing at all, but that makes the Muslim "smear," if it is coming from Hillary, more egregious, not less, because she would be playing to people's prejudices.

How to Lie using Facts

In the context of a book review, Time's Lev Grossman provides some insight into how to mislead using facts:

I say appears because as vivid and visceral as Human Smoke [italics mine (! -- when did they stop italicizing book titles)] is, it has a maddeningly slippery quality. In presenting bare facts unadorned by any commentary, Human Smoke [ditto] cloaks itself in an aura of limpid, virtuous purity. But beneath that cloak, things get a little murky because in presenting the facts as he does, Baker is making an argument that he doesn't explicitly state. Does he really believe--as he seems to--that aerial bombing is on a moral continuum with Nazi genocide? And that Adolf Hitler's hatred of Jews is comparable to Churchill's hatred of the Germans and Japanese? (We get Mrs. Churchill calling them "Nazi hogs" and "yellow Japanese lice" in a letter?) Or that the world would be a better place if--delirious fantasy--Europe had met German aggression with nonviolent resistance? I mean, if you're going to strongly imply that England should have made peace with Hitler, you might as well just come out and say it.

It's hard to argue with somebody who won't argue. It's almost like there's an unspoken analogy at work between Gandhi's nonviolence and Baker's noncommentary: Baker declines to take up arms in support of his thesis, as if to do so would be to commit rhetorical violence against the facts. But facts, even tragic ones, require context and interpretation. They don't speak for themselves. That's why we need historians.

I would add, that is also why we need journalists. News media are not doing themselves a favor by pretending a story can have an angle without having a slant. Their job is not merely to regurgitate just the facts, they also need to provide context and interpretation.

Guns 'n' Quotes

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. – Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Constitution shall never be construed … to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. – Samuel Adams

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. – Thomas Jefferson

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest. – Mahatma Gandhi, in Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 446

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. – William S. Burroughs

Let's hear a dissenting view:

This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future! – Adolph Hitler [1935] The Weapons Act of Nazi Germany.

Chilling.

Why this matters.

Thanks to the Libertarian Party of Boulder for the quotes.

McCain turns Turncoat on Social Security Reform?

CNN Money reports that John McCain has gone soft on Social Security reform:

Unlike his Democratic rivals, McCain has expressed support for individual investment accounts as a way to augment Social Security benefits. But his campaign has indicated he no longer favors diverting payroll taxes from Social Security to fund those accounts - a centerpiece of President Bush's Social Security reform proposal.

It can't be true, can it? Perhaps just a smear?

For the moment, let me go on the assumption that it is utterly, sadly, true. If you're not diverting workers' funds from a failing Social Security system back to the workers themselves, are you going to come up with a new flavor of IRA, similar to what has been proposed by both Obama and Clinton? If people could afford to put money into a new flavor of IRA, they would put money in one of the existing flavors of IRA, or their 401(k).

So I guess it's official: there is no damn reason to vote for John McCain.

Atlas Shrugged, UNCC Winced

It was surprising to see Ayn Rand's name in The Charlotte Observer yesterday. The newspaper offers a tale of woe with the title "Donor gave, and UNCC winced."

John Allison, the CEO of BB&T, has directed the charitable arm of his company to give $28 million to 27 colleges to study the moral, not merely the pragmatic, foundations of capitalism. At least 17 of these gifts came with a precondition: one course must include Atlas Shrugged as required reading:

John Allison discovered Rand as a business major at UNC in the late '60s. "Atlas Shrugged" remains his favorite book.

"Most of the defenders of free markets mostly do it from an economic perspective," Allison says. "They argue that free markets produce a higher standard of living, which is certainly very good. But Rand makes a connection to human nature and why individual rights and free markets are the only system consistent with human nature."

Of that $28+ million, Allison is generously giving $1 million to the University of North Carolina for developing a speaker series on business ethics, develop a course on the fundamentals of capitalism, provide research money, and create an Ayn Rand reading room at the school. Some at UNCC are less than thrilled:

"It's going to make us look like a rinky-dink university," UNCC religious studies professor Richard Cohen said Thursday after UNCC Chancellor Phil Dubois told the faculty council about the gift. "It's like teaching the Bible as a requirement."

It gets worse:

[Richard] Cohen, the religious studies professor, responded that Rand was an ideologue, not a serious economist. "It would be exactly like having a Karl Marx room," he said.

Really? There is one key difference, Professor Cohen, that seems to have bubbled over your head. Marx's side lost the Cold War. Rand's side won. (It's tempting here to say, "Your side lost. Get over it.")

Allison's keen sense of business ethics has been on display before. After the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006 gave the green light for considering enrichment of the tax base as a basis for eminent domain in the Kelo decision, BB&T decided it would not "lend to commercial developers that plan to build condominiums, shopping malls and other private projects on land taken from private citizens by government entities using eminent domain."

Good Friday

Image derived from photo by mberry using Ascgen dotNET and used under license of Creative Commons. The same license that applies to the original work applies to the derivative work.

It's hard to tell at this size, especially with my template seeming to shrink the image, but the resulting image is composed completely of text characters.

Sensible Advice from Karl Rove

This is old, but I didn't see it mentioned anywhere except the Moderate Voice. who quotes Marc Abinder in the Atlantic:

No less an authority figure than Karl Rove has warned Republican operatives from demagoguing Barack Obama’s middle name.

At a closed door meeting of GOP state executive directors in late January, Rove said the safest way to refer to Obama would be to use his honorific, "Sen. Obama."

"The context was, you’re not going to stigmatize this guy. You shouldn’t underestimate him," one of the executive directors said. Rove said that the use of "Barack Hussein Obama" would perpetuate the notion that Republicans were bigoted and would hurt the party

For some reason, Joe Gandelman (yes, he still posts on his own blog, although it's hard to tell these days with the diversity of the authorship there) doubts the Republican Party will heed Rove's advice. If they don't listen, it would indeed "perpetuate the notion that Republicans were bigoted and would hurt the party" and I think survival is a priority for that party (I turned in my membership card recently).

Karl Rove, of course, is the so-called "evil genius" behind President George W's two successful presidential campaigns.

Political Survey

I have been asked to provide a link to a political survey.

What we are doing is conducting what we think is rather ground-breaking scientific research in the hopes of better understanding voting behavior from a psychological perspective. The survey we are conducting is not aimed at changing respondents' opinions in any way, and this study is not being funded by any interest group or any of the candidates...

If you are interested in taking the survey, click below:
http://www.psychsurveys.org/brietruesdell/2008primaries

Rev. G. D. America

You've seen Rev. Wright's "G. D. America" sermon. For those who say Rev. Wright's comments were taken out of context, the context was that five days previously, the World Trade Center collapsed, killing thousands of people. There were stories in the media about students who cheered as it happened. Did Rev. Wright join them? Barack Obama's close association with Rev. Wright will likely hurt the candidate.

According to ABC News, Obama has known Rev. Wright was a liability for over a year:

"I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have [been] the subject of this controversy," Obama said, saying that he'd never heard any of them personally.

"One of them I had heard about after I had started running for president and I put out a statement at that time condemning them," he continued.

But more than a year ago, Obama disinvited Wright from speaking at his candidacy announcement. Wright told The New York Times then that Obama told him, "You can get kind of rough in the sermons. … It's best for you not to be out there in public."

C.S. Lewis on the Common Good

Thus spake C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Ayn Rand would surely agree.

Hat tip to the Libertarian Party of Boulder, Colorado for their monster collection of libertarian quotes, conveniently provided on one fast loading page.

7 Mortal Sins Plenty for Most People, Says Vatican

I wanted to write a rant on the seven additional deadly sins issued by the Catholic Church, which would bring the number of mortal sins to 14 (collect them all), but the Acton Institute blog set me straight: the story appears to be entirely a media invention. The Acton Institute identifies the journalistic carelessness that led to headlines like "Recycle or go to Hell, warns Vatican" and contains a pdf of an English translation of the actual interview the story was seeded from.

It turns out there is no new sin of excessive compensation per se. So it appears there is no need for me to observe that coveting excessive compensation is the real sin.

The mainstream media are interpreting this paragraph as saying there are seven new mortal sins:

In your opinion, what are the "new sins"?
There are various areas today in which we adopt sinful behavior, as with individual and social rights. This is especially so in the field of bioethics where we cannot deny the existence of violations of fundamental rights of human nature—this occurs by way of experiments and genetic modifications, whose results we cannot easily predict or control. Another area, which indeed pertains to the social spectrum, is that of drug use, which weakens our minds and reduces our intelligence. As a result, any young people are left out of Church circles. Here’s another one: social and economic inequality, in the sense that the rich always seem to get richer, and the poor, poorer. This [phenomenon] feeds off an unsustainable form of social injustice and is related to environmental issues—which currently have much relevant interest.

Well, it does sort of say that excessive compensation (or excessive lack of compensation) is a sin, but it doesn't call it a mortal or deadly sin, and it doesn't seem to be issuing "infallible" doctrine.

I still believe Nancy Gibbs makes some salient points in her essay in Time. If excessive wealth is sinful, she asks, "what do we make of Bill Gates, the Great Acquisitor, who, as a philanthropist, is now arguably the greatest individual force for good around the world?"

Another Kind of Self-Determination

The Chinese Global Geographic Times, via WORLDMEETS.US, says "America's Iraq Failure is No Failure of Democracy":

Democracy is a good thing for everyone in the world. Americans are no exception and neither are the Iraqis. Iraq's people, like people all over the world, have the right to enjoy democracy - which includes the right to define and develop their own democratic institutions. It should be obvious that the choice of what kind of democracy to choose can only be decided by the Iraqis. The people of every nation have the desire to pursue democracy and must have the freedom to choose the right democratic model consistent with its own conditions.

Democracies differ around the world. The world is a colorful pageantry - so how could the world's democracies be any less so? Democracies are different because each nation's culture, history, values, and stage of social development is different. We can say that the "soil" of the society determines what kind of democratic "tree" grows. Democracy needs nurturing, sure, but most important of all is the soil it grows in.

Democracy cannot be wholly transplanted. Whether democracy takes root and goes on to flower and bear fruit depends on whether the majority of people believe that it's suitable for the country's political, economic, and cultural soil. And whether one looks at history or at current events, the lesson is that forcibly transplanted democracy carried the seeds of its own destruction, and will result in very dangerous consequences..

Read it all (same link). Via the Moderate Voice. I will say I do not see the article, as some do, as solely a defense of the pace of reform in China itself.

Here's another voice on the theme of a people's right to grab hold of freedom at their own pace:

I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the...[g]overnment to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists.

That was John F. Kennedy quoted by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in his book In Retrospect. Well, you know the rest of the story: the opposite happened, possibly, McNamara believes, hastened by JFK's untimely assassination.

My own position on the Iraq War is extremely complicated and unsettled. I'll try to say a little more about that.

Stock Footage Girl for Obama

The sleeping 8-year-old girl from Hillary Clinton's "3 A.M. Phone call" ad:



is actually stock footage. The girl is now 18 and a huge Obama supporter.

(Via Newsvine)

Cost of Not Reforming Social Security

Subtext refers to that which is never stated explicitly but is nevertheless part of the message. Lately, I have been thinking about how people can blatantly lie as long they lie in subtext instead of actual words. For example, when a certain beverage manufacturer advertises that "Red Bull® gives you wings," what they want you to think is "Caffeine + Sugar = Viagra®." That is subtext, and when the subtext isn't spelled out, it's hard to argue against.

Su