This Great Plank in Your Own - Having endorsed Knapp's evisceration of the Abu Ghraib Six, I must also commend RudePundit's letter to overhyped blowhard John McCain (and by extensionm "principled" Republicans generally), written on the eve of the vote. Oh well.

You know, Senator McCain, you alone in that Senate chamber know what is what when it comes to torture. And you also know that the moment will come when even the hardest men will break and gladly confess lies about themselves. After nearly killing yourself because of the constant pain, you signed a confession. You wrote, "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate," words you knew were ludicrous at best and baseless lies at bottom. But you signed, you signed, you just wanted the fucking pain to end and who, really, could blame you but cowards and liars themselves.

Yes, yes, we know that you were a real soldier of a nation's military, a real prisoner of a real war so that the breaking of the Geneva Convention was more clear-cut. But, in the end, what happened to you meets the boundaries of legal torture laid out in the memo that Alberto Gonzales requested: you were never brought to organ failure or, indeed, death. If you support Gonzales or the President on this, what you will say is that others deserve what you went through, that your torture at the hands of your captors will be simply the average, expected behavior of our nation towards those we pre-deem evil. Like the North Vietnamese believed you were.

And you will have contradicted yourself with your amendment to the Intelligence Reform Bill, the amendment you put forth with Joe Lieberman outlawing "extreme interrogation measures." It passed with 96 votes in the Senate and was cut in conference committee, with the advice of the Bush adminstration involved. These fuckers don't care about your pain, your torture. They only believe in power, like every torturing nation in history.

There is more.

Via Nephew, who writes

Well come on, you say, whoever expected a Senate Republican to choose morality and the rule of law over partisanship and the love of power? I did. Even just one would have been nice.

Yes. Very.

"Not Only No But F--K No" - Libertarian Democrat Thomas Knapp has a little list - the Democratic Senate roll of shame:

Only a month into the 109th Congress, these six US Senators have already demonstrated their unfitness for re-election or promotion. In yesterday's roll call vote on the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, they destroyed the chances of a much-needed filibuster and joined 54 Republicans in endorsing torture, perjury and executive lawlessness.

Obviously every single Republican Senator disgraced himself with this vote too. (I'm particularly disappointed in Chuck Hagel.) But we've learned, over the last three years, that the whip hand over our one-party state is not the party of civil liberties. Can we have one?

Sort of on the subject, Diana Moon wrote me yesterday:

They were the only ones to vote against Gonzales.

Ergo, you are a Democrat.

I wrote her back that I can't be a Democrat, because then I'd go from the sort of libertarian who often says things that please Dem partisans to the sort of Democrat who is "not a team player," a veritable Mickey Kaus of perfidy. I'll just hang outside the tent here, where the light still reaches and someone occasionally sets a drink within reach, thanks.

More seriously, I've pondered this question a lot since the election. What I come back to everytime is that I am viscerally anti-bully and government still seems like the biggest bully around. I don't believe government is inherently a force for good. I do not accept that democracy is a process by which "we" govern "ourselves." I believe it is a process by which a larger group imposes its will on the smaller, and the most energetic and glib busybodies impose their will on the larger. Living on the fringes of DC, I have occasion to drive or walk by the White House and the Capital from time to time. I am not stirred. The hot dog vendor exchanging food for money fills me with more admiration than the bureaucrats walking past him, immersed in discussion of what they surely think of as "the public's business."

Some years ago I wrote a poem about the Korean War Memorial opening, impelled by the realization that it was built on the very sector fo the Mall where the temporary quonset huts of the national-security state sat while construction proceeded on the Pentagon; in other words, from that very spot men sent other men to war. Of the soldiers represented by the memorial statues, I concluded

It was this mud that sucked at their boots.

Bottom line: I don't feel like a Democrat. But I recognize that, within the realm of partisan politics, the Democratic Party is the only possible counterweight to the madness and vainglory that have seized the Republicans.

Tis the Season - Speaking of Gridiron Festivus, one of the amusing aspects of the season is how all the advertisers who haven't paid to use the words "Super Bowl" refer to it in their commercials and promotions. The all-time best was the 2003 Dean's Dip trip contest, where the announcer allowed that

For legal reasons, we can't tell you the name of this event, but winning would be Super, like a Bowl of Dean's Dip.

The radio ad's final flourish was probably one toke over the line and likely why they haven't repeated the promo since:

"Win a trip to the uper-say owl-bay."

Does this country have some messed-up intellectual property laws or what?

Happy Festivus - the real one, I mean: Super Bowl Weekend. Justin Slotman offers a meatball recipe to go with my dry buffalo wings. ("The wings would be the kind of thing you would have at the beginning of the game; you'd keep the meatballs stewing in the crockpot waiting for people to pick through them at halftime. That's the plan.")

He has links to a bunch of other snacky recipes too. Hm. You can put together a good feed from that post. You could put together a good feed from Justin's blog, an RSS feed, I mean. And you'd be the first, because he sure as hell hasn't done it yet.

Who's Better, The New MSN Search or Google? May be MSN! I'm the fourth Henley there, as of this evening. On Google I'm only Number Six. (Who is Number Two? Hey, that's old school Number Six talk. There's a new Number Six in town now. We make a good match, no?)

Note: Stefanescu's chosen search engine, Answers.com, is terrible. Really awful.

Shocking Anti-Endorsement - I'm not much of a joiner, but this particular campaign matters.

I've said why before.

Now it Can Be Told - I don't know if this "banned Super Bowl commercial" is authentic or not. But it's amusing.

Via the Beat.

They Make a Desert and We Call it Fleece - The hot philosophical colloquy this week is about desert, specifically whether Hayek says people deserve their income. Elizabeth Anderson says he doesn't. Tyler Cowen argues, if I read him right, that her claim is somewhat beside the point; Will Wilkinson says she's sort of wrong, and then says it again. Chris Dillow actually quotes Hayek; and Yglesias wants to call the game:

People deserve things relative to a system of social arrangements. If you promise to give me something, then I deserve to get that thing when you promised to give it to me. But abstracted away from any real practices, desert doesn't mean anything. But insofar as you feel like you need an argument about this, I think the argument from luck does about all the work you need.

The step that no one has managed to make is the one between arguing that people don't "deserve" their incomes/assets/property and establishing that someone else does deserve to dispossess them of same. (One of the commenters to one of the above posts makes this point, but I don't recall just where.) By any standard according to which Matt hasn't earned his income, I sure as hell haven't earned it.

And why stop with incomes or property? In the same senses that Matt hasn't earned his income (no, I wouldn't trade, but I got twenty years of indifferent careerism on the guy), he hasn't earned his rather enjoyable-sounding job at the Prospect. Oh sure, he writes well; he appears to meet his deadlines; he is philosophically in tune with the journal's owners and he did his shit work as a writing fellow or whatever before stepping up to the Big Time. (Medium Time?) But so? A lot of the qualities that make him a good writer and qualified liberal opinion-mag journalist are entirely outside his control - chiefly, he was born to literate, well-to-do leftie parents. Such parents make sure their children get a good education and that he will Know People, or at least Know People Who Know People. Such embryonic talents can also afford to work for free at the internships that function as registration tables for the policy-wonk convention.

Point is, all sorts of people might like Matt's job. The parties alone are worth it. If "we" can give his money to someone else, why can't "we" give his job to a conservative from the wrong side of the tracks, or an illiterate? Or redistribute his apartment? Or his Arcade Fire tickets? Heck, there are people who would like my job too, if only for the cool views of the River I get from the parking lot. Why shouldn't "we" give it to them? My kids are cute. What have I done to deserve them?

My answer to everyone except Mrs. Offering is, "More than you have." But my general claim is that disproving desert of income - assuming one can - is proving little.

Testing, One Two . . . - Atrios writes

It is not partisan for anti-torture Democrats to oppose Gonzales. It is partisan for anti-torture Republicans to support him.

Absolutely. Couldn't have said it better myself, though I could manage to use a lot more words.

Now here's the thing. Atrios also reports that

Not a single Senate Democrat will support President Bush’s proposal to divert a portion of the Social Security payroll tax to personal investment accounts, Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Tuesday.

per Josh Marshall.

Okay. Now will the Democrats show the same unity in opposing the Gonzales nomination - that is, can the Democratic Party muster as single-minded a devotion to the principle that torture is un-American as it can to the current contours of our largest entitlement program?

Eye on the Sky - Flit is always your go-to site for questions about SAM strike authenticity. As regards Sunday's British transport plain loss North of Baghdad, he says

[I]t should go without saying that there's no shoulder-launched missile in existence that could take down a C-130 Hercules instantaneously in midflight, and there's zero reason to believe the insurgents have anything big enough (like a telephone pole-sized SAM-2 or Patriot). (The separate Ansar al-Islam claim that an anti-tank weapon was used can also be dismissed out of hand.)

There's more. He concludes that the plane exploded due to either natural causes (unlikely, he says) or an on-board bomb.

Life Imitates TEAM AMERICA, WORLD POLICE - They've captured one of our puppets!

Look, I have to work all day. I can't help it that these news cycles have played out by the time I get home. Currently running on super glue and broken eyeglass frames, thank you for asking. Should be able to steal time Thursday to get new, glueless specs.

No Pie - Broke eyeglass frames. Sad. Read War Nerd instead. Fun, in a scary way. Via Unruled.

More Social Security - Tim Lee responds to Matthew Yglesias' criticisms of the Cato Calculator by building his own. In comments, he answers my own concerns about the Cato Calculator's income assumptions.

Making Straight Things - Two interesting items over on Crooked Timber this evening. First, Henry Farrell reviews Gregg Easterbrook reviewing Jared Diamond, but what's interesting is his general point:

It seems to me that there’s a shared attitude towards science among various right-leaning technophiles (Glenn Reynolds being a paradigmatic example). Roughly speaking, they tend to agree with science when it suggest new possibilities for human beings (the Singularity! nanotechnology! conquering the universe via spaceflight! longer lifespans!) and to strongly disagree with scientific results or prognoses that suggest fundamental limits to human beings’ can-do ability to prevail over their circumstances (global warming, ecological collapse).

This is surely true. It has a lot to do why, despite everything, I suspect I still count as a right-winger of sorts - I fit that pattern. But I think Henry reverses cause and effect here. Right-leaning technophiles adopt this posture because, in our experience, scientific (or scientistic) pessimism has proven itself repeatedly, embarassingly wrong, from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome. We saw Julian Simon win the Great Dispute of the 1970s, and are inclined to think the Julian Simons of today and tomorrow will win their own disputes. We may be right or wrong, but we haven't been proved wrong yet. If the ecology does collapse, or the direst projections of global warming bear out, then among the survivors many fewer "right-leaning technophiles" will exist, and previous ones will probably have our skulls smashed in with rocks. I do not believe that day will come, but if it does, Henry knows where to find me, and there's a stony stream within a short walk from my house.

Meanwhile, in a consideration of Iraq's political future, Kieran Healy relates Iraq's needs to the natal histories of the Irish Republic and Botswana. For one thing, the item points up the tragedy that so few participants in disputes over the proper course of the Global War on Terror have any historical references beyond Vietnam, World War II and the American Civil War. But I'm most intrigued and disquieted by his point about historical contingency:

Cases of successful transitions in resource-rich nations are few: Botswana springs to mind, I suppose. Though there the consensus is that “three honest men” (the first three heads of state) were what got them through without a coup or a descent into anarchy. This is a depressingly un-sociological conclusion. It’d be much better if it all depended on something reliable, like the proportion of the population over 30, or the percentage of homes with running water or something. Honest men are thin on the ground.

Yes, and add the United States to the list, at least on the popular (and, I think, largely correct, theory of George Washington as "indispensible man").

Election Day - We anti-interventionists are fond of quoting "the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own." I remain convinced, moreso than ever, that this is the only principle on which a wise and just foreign policy can be based. But as "friends of liberty everywhere," we can only be pleased that today's Iraqi elections have gone relatively smoothly, and only admire the determination and enthusiasm Iraq's voters brought to their task and privilege. We cannot yet know if the results will be honestly tabulated or lead to effective, just and liberal governance; voting is only the first step in building a free society. But we can know that the act was nothing less than a joy for many of Iraq's citizens, and that the first step in any process is nevertheless essential to all those that follow.