The Stew

I want to make two points about Dick Cheney’s views on waterboarding. Here’s what he said in his speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., yesterday.

In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.

That’s a bold claim, and one that — conveniently — may never be provable. He can continue to point to real or fictitious classified documents that may or may not back up what he’s saying, and those documents cannot be unclassified for security reasons. He can even go through the motions of asking for such documents to be released, knowing full well that they won’t be.

Of course, he could have released such documents when he was in power, but didn’t. Applying Occam’s razor,  he’s lying.

It amazes me that we’re even having this discussion about the efficacy of torture. It’s beyond the point. The point is, you don’t get to do things that are unconstitutional. Police might have a much easier time with the war on drugs if they could just randomly enter people’s houses and search for contraband, but that pesky constitution says they can’t. Even if I could prove that such a policy would be efficacious, it’s not going to happen.

But let’s take Cheney’s logic to the next few steps:

• If our enhanced interrogation techniques, which included waterboarding, are legal, essential, justified and successful, does that mean all methods of torture are thus? If you’ve waterboarded a guy 180 times in one month and he hasn’t talked, would it be okay to waterboard his young child in front of him? Why or why not? Would it be okay to switch to flaying?
• If this works so well, why limit it to a few dozen suspects in Cuba? How about letting police departments all over the U.S. start using these techniques on anyone suspected of any crime? They’re legal and they work, after all.

I can’t believe this stuff even needs to be discussed in this country. Grabbing people and secreting them away to hidden dungeons where they’re tortured into confessing their crimes — that’s what we were told happened in the police state of the former Soviet Union. The United States was supposed to be fighting that sort of thing.

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is a funny film. At least I think it is. I only managed to get about 45 minutes into it before my Blu-ray player sounded like it was grinding corn for the day’s tortillas.

Lo and  behold, upon inspecting the disc, a crack near the edge. So I used the handy “Report a Problem” link on the Netflix site, and they’re sending me out a new one tomorrow. End of story, right?

Well, it would be, except that this happened to me two weeks ago with a copy of “Hancock.” The replacement Netflix sent out worked fine, so I managed to finish watching that one. (It was about half of really good movie, but that’s a story for a different blog post.) I didn’t think anything of it at the time — but now that it’s happened to me twice, I had to use the Google to find out if something is amiss.

Sure enough, there are plenty of annecdotes about cracked Blu-rays from Netflix. When pressed, Netflix apparently blames the Post Office for mishandling the discs. The Post Office apparently blames Netflix for using crappy paper envelopes for shipping the discs. They’re probably both right. All I know is that it’s enough of an inconvenience that the missus thinks I should drop Blu-rays and only order regular DVDs from Netflix. Cooler heads prevailed, but Netflix should take note: Since you’re charging extra for these things, you should probably find a way to have them delivered properly.

Edit (04/21/09): Replacement copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal,” also cracked.

Edit (04/24/09): Replacement of replacement copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal,” also cracked. Netflix customer service gave me a Post Office number and basically told me to bitch to them.

Edit (04/28/09): Replacement of replacement copy of replacement copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal,” also cracked. I’ve switched to DVD-only. If anyone knows how to contact Netflix executives to express displeasure, please let me know.

Edit (04/29/09): I thought I was going to get a DVD, but my Blu-ray subscription runs through the end of the month. So they sent me another cracked Blu-ray.

Edit (05/02/09): Another day, another cracked copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal.” This time, I didn’t ask for a replacement.

Quick — can you spot my left anterior descending artery in the first image? No? That’s because it was nearly completely blocked at the time. After doctors inserted a couple of tiny plastic/metal mesh thingys, it popped open as shown in the second image.

I had a heart attack. At 39. Unexpected, to say the least. I figured it out early enough and went to a hospital close enough that doctors say I shouldn’t suffer any permanent damage.

I’m pretty much back the way I was before, minus about 12 pounds and with a notable lack of bacon in my life. Most days go by and I don’t even think about it. Other days, I think about it as the life-changing experience that it actually was.

So anyway, if I haven’t been updating here very often lately, it’s because of this.

“Guilt is a Useless Emotion” is a track off the most recent New Order album. That title came to mind when I read a recent story on CNN.com about “TiVo Guilt.”

Apparently, people are having to deal with the fact that they’ve used their DVRs to record more TV than they can reasonably get to. I understand this concept for a couple of reasons. First, I grew up Catholic, so I know something about guilt. Second, I recently upgraded the hard drive in my home-built DVR from 200 GB to 500 GB — and I’m constantly in danger of running out of space.

However, even this recovering Catholic finds it hard to feel guilty about either not watching something contemporaneously with its broadcast (what is the point of a DVR, after all, if not for time-shifting) or deleting something without watching it at all. Here’s some unwatched stuff that I purged recently, without shedding a tear:

• The last half of season 2 of “Heroes.”
• The entire second season of “Notes from the Underbelly.”
• Five episodes of “The Graham Norton Show.”
• The movie “Flightplan.”

Some of these were probably worth watching. None of them were worth losing sleep over. And guilt? Please. Now I’ve got room for a few more episodes of “Fringe,” which I’m almost caught up on. But if I don’t get to them for a while, I think I’ll live.

…but that’s not really the point of this. I don’t want to gloat, after all. Although, I’ve got to say, I’ve been walking around with a spring in my step this week. And you can get these neat hats at CafePress.

No, I’d rather talk about Palin — because you just can’t get enough Palin. Turns out that in one post-election poll, 69% of Republicans think Palin helped the McCain-Palin ticket. This flies in the face of the results from “the only poll that matters,” wherein 60% of voters thought Palin was not qualified to be president.

After the election, Fox reported that McCain staffers said of Palin:

• She didn’t know Africa was a continent, and not a country
• She couldn’t name the three countries in the North American Free Trade Agreement (hint — it’s the three countries in North America)
• She spent way more on clothes and other stuff than was previously reported.

I understand that Republicans like things in black and white, and these revelations set up a clear black-and-white scenario. One of the following is true:

1) The McCain people who sat on this information and portrayed Palin as ready for prime time tried to foist a huge fraud on the American people; or

2) The McCain people have absolutely no scruples and are willing to make negative stuff up about others in order to hide their own shortcomings.

I really don’t care which one is true, although I’m willing to be that there’s more truth in #1 than #2. In either event, I’m even more sure that America did the right thing this week.

Is it just my imagination, or are the Republicans deathly afraid of the status quo?

I keep hearing all of these horrible scenarios that will befall the U.S. if, as it is becoming increasingly likely, Obama is elected president next week. If that happens…

1) We’ll have (gasp) SOCIALISM! Obama is apparently a closet Marxist, and wants to take all your monies and give them to people on the welfare. The whole socialism argument would have made more sense before our current Republican administration started the process of partially nationalizing banks and insurance companies — also known as socialism.

It’s frightening to me that this Marxist argument has any kind of traction, because it’s so ridiculous on so many levels. While McCain and Palin rail against the redistribution of wealth — apparently forgetting that Palin helped orchestrate a huge redistribution from oil companies to Alaska citizens — George Will this week rightfully pointed out that the very purpose of Washington, D.C., is to redistribute wealth. We call it “taxes.” Look it up.

2) The economy will collapse! According to McCain, this is the wrong time to raise taxes on anyone — especially the folks making more than a quarter of a million dollars a year or more, since they create jobs. Raise taxes now, and companies will move jobs overseas, people will make less money, businesses will suffer… it’ll look a lot like the economy looks right now.

McCain’s entire economic solution rests on this idea that cutting taxes will solve our problems. In his mind, did the last 8 years not happen? Did Bush raise taxes when we weren’t looking? And yet we ended up where we are now.

Empirical evidence doesn’t seem to matter to the Republican mind. Got surpluses? We need a tax cut! Going to war? Tax cut! Rising deficits? Tax cut! Economic collapse? Why, a tax cut will clear that right up! Horse feathers.

3) Our enemies will be emboldened! Giving the reins to an untested Obama means that he won’t bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran and we’ll have other countries walking all over us. Reminds me of a great joke I heard a couple of years ago: What’s the difference between Washington, D.C. and Tehran? Tehran has a plan for Iraq.

Bush has been walking back from his own policies concerning Iran, Iraq, and North Korea because those plans just plain weren’t working. All of that walking has brought him to where Obama said we needed to be in the first place. The only person who seems to think we should keep doing what we were doing for years — with the opposite of what you’d consider an appreciable return on investment — is McCain.

4) We’ll have one-party rule! McCain has been late to this party, but he’s been getting a lot of help from the pundit class on this one. There’s a general consensus among thinking folk that this is a good argument: Since, as we know for sure, the Democrats are going to gain seats in the House and Senate this election, we need a McCain in power to keep one party from ruling both branches of government.

Technically, this isn’t an argument against the status quo — but it’s an argument against what was the status quo for six years out of the last eight in this country. So let me suggest to those trying to make this argument: unless you voted for John Kerry in the last presidential election, shut the hell up.

Sounds almost naughty. “Curious about foreclosed properties?” Click here for discrete information you can read in the privacy of your own home/apartment/ cardboard box.

I got this gem of an email the other day from a local real estate outfit. They’re trying to put as pretty a face as possible on the subprime debacle, and as a fellow marketer I can’t really blame them.

Speaking of blame, though, there’s something I’ve got to get off my chest.

There’s been this interesting thought cruising through the conservative ranks related to who’s really to blame for the mortgage meltdown. Unsurprisingly, they think it’s dark people.

Here’s how it works. In 1977, Congress passed and President Carter signed into law the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which forced banks to serve underserved communities. Typically, that meant poor- and moderate-income minority neighborhoods. Conservatives say that if not for this piece of regulation, banks wouldn’t have been forced to offer mortgages to colored folk who couldn’t afford them, and none of the subsequent capitalistic implosion would have happened.

I laughed the first time I heard that, since it was obviously concocted by some young white person. I’m old enough to remember that prior to anti-redlining laws like the CRA, banks could legally discriminate against minorities with impunity. And it’s not like that sort of discrimination has been eradicated – it’s just moved a few inches under ground.

I was prepared to write the theory off as one that would only appeal to the loony right, until I heard George Will utter something similar on the TV show “This Week” this week. While I am under no illusion that George will be reading this, I feel the need to respond now that an honest-to-goodness conservative thinker thinks this is plausible.

1) Why so long? If the CRA forced innocent banks to lend to those inconsiderate and undeserving black people, why did it take 30 years for the mortgage crisis to erupt? The easy answer: there’s no correlation.

2) The CRA specifically instructed banks to use the same criteria in evaluating loan-worthiness for poor people as rich people. E.g., if two people have good credit scores and income histories, you don’t get to say “no” to someone who lives in a bad neighborhood and “yes” to someone in a good neighborhood. So to the extent that Joe Suburb was offered a Ninja loan, Joe Inner City had to be offered one as well. I have no idea why the inner city folk are being singled out, when one suburban mortgage that implodes can be worth as much as 5 of those in the city.

3) I’d be more willing to accept this notion of “the government forced us to loan money to coloreds” defense if, at any time from 2002-2006, any mortgage originator had stood up and said, “Hey, investment folks, I know it looks like we’re making billions of dollars here, but we’re writing a lot of bad paper. The government has forced us to write loans we know are worthless, so be careful.” I don’t remember hearing that from anyone, do you?

4) Similarly, I’d be more willing to blame dark people for this mess if they’d had anything to do with the mortgage derivatives or securities that actually caused the financial meltdown. See, having a mortgage you can’t pay used to be an issue for only you and your bank. You defaulted, and your bank owned your asset. Suddenly, in this century, under this president (i.e., not last century, under Carter), it got a lot more complicated with people bundling huge swaths of mortgages and selling insurance against the possibility of those mortgages going down in value. All the cool kids on Wall Street did it, making billions in the process. We know now that what they were doing was pure, unadulterated gambling. And they lost. Guess what — you don’t get to blame the plastics company for supplying the raw material used to make the dice you used to lose your shirt at the craps table.

5) Subprime borrowers do share a measure of the blame. Not a huge measure, but a measure. If you make $50,000 a year, you have no business trying to live in a $300,000 house. I’m sorry your high school economics class didn’t prepare you for that little bit of truth.

But seriously, conservatives need to man up. Personal responsibility doesn’t end when you bundle a lot of personal irresponsibility and sell it to some dupe who resells it to some other dupe. If you think the market can do no wrong, and the government can do no right, you need to own this crisis — and don’t go blaming poor people or begging taxpayers for help.

Substantively, the first McCain-Obama debate was a wash. Anti-intellectual conservatives can bitch and moan about how Obama sounded like he was full of “book learnin’” while McCain had experience — but that’s only going to fly for the faithful. Similarly, Obama just hasn’t been to the places or had the experiences McCain has had. Even if you feel McCain has drawn the wrong conclusion from those experiences, he still had them. Only partisans won’t admit that.

The faithful remained faithful after the debate. I saw some polling that Republicans thought McCain won by 90%-10%, while Democrats thought Obama won by 93%-7%.

It’s the undecideds — or the “willfully ignorant,” as I’ve heard them called — who will decide this thing. They looked at the unsubstantial stuff — the body language, the temperament, etc. They broke something like 1.5-1 or 2-1 thinking that Obama won, depending on which news outlet’s polls you’re looking at. Obama definitely came across as presidential, seemed to know generally what he was talking about, and didn’t make a major gaffe or take a major punch. Considering that he was ahead going into this thing, a tie does McCain no good — especially since the topic of the debate, foreign policy, was supposed to be his strongest area.

You can read stuff like that on any of a few thousand blogs. Here’s something that people aren’t talking much about, but I guarantee you will become big by the time the Sunday shows come on: Where was Sarah Palin?

Joe Biden was on every network (save ABC, who wouldn’t have him on because they couldn’t find Palin), talking about how well his candidate did and how badly the other candidate did. You’d expect Palin would have been the counterpoint, but she was conspicuous in her absence. Extremely conspicuous.

Some CNN viewers, so conditioned by the GOP to see media bias under every rock and behind every tree, emailed Wolf Blitzer to ask him why they talked to Biden but didn’t talk to Palin. He basically answered that he had yelled “Olly olly oxen free,” but she hadn’t shown up yet.

If you don’t trust that your number 2 can go on the air and say nice things about you, what else don’t you trust her with?

The John McCain “suspend your campaign in order to win” strategy is going on right as this is being typed, so there are plenty of theories as to what’s really going on.

My initial thought was that he’s trying to duck the debate. It was supposed to be about foreign policy, but it’s inevitable that the economic crisis would take some or all of the debate time.

That’s not a very satisfying reason, though. He’s a war hero, fer crissake — he can’t be afraid of a little debate, can he?

Well, his campaign just released a statement that offers a much more reasonable theory. He wants to delay this week’s debate to October 2 — which just so happens to be the date of the Vice Presidential debate. He’s proposing that the Presidential debate overtake the venue for the Vice Presidential one, with that debate being delayed until later.

Delayed, my ass. All of this has been a ruse to get Palin out of debating.

Check out the first headline under the “Also on MSN” header to the right. I won’t belabor the same point I made a few months ago about the media’s inability to handle any of the serious matters that concern the country in this election year.

I’ve got to really stretch my imagination to picture what the pitch meeting for that story looked like. And I wonder, if the reporter didn’t have anything to do with the idea, whether he or she died a little bit inside while writing it. I know I would have.

It also makes one wonder about the stories that didn’t make the cut that day:

• Use biorhythms to pick your living room color
• How a divining rod can help your choose your next career
• Plan your next meal psychically
• Nostradamus has prophesied your next boyfriend

We’re going to have a hard time explaining this to future generations.