Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

Among the conclusions–58 percent of all Dems think it’s acceptable to have a baby outside of marriage, but only 39 percent of black Dems think so. 51 percent of all Dems think abortion is morally acceptable, only 37 percent of black Dems think so. 64 percent of Dems think sex between unmarried is acceptable, but only 40 percent of blacks do. 57 percent of all Dems think the death penalty is morally acceptable. Only 47 percent of blacks agree. What are you seeing here? Here’s a hint–76 percent of all black dems attend church weekly, as compared with only 50 percent of nonblack Dems. Black Dems are actually more church-going than Republicans.

It’s enough to make a Theocon cry.

Tim made this point a few days back, but I’m particularly drawn to Hendrik Hertzberg’s take on the matter of packing the White House of President-elect Barack Hussein Obama with old Clinton hands.

What is a “Clinton person”? Apparently, it”s any Democrat under about fifty or fifty-five years of age who has had work experience in the executive branch of the federal government.

The theory seems to be that a “Clinton person” would be inclined, at best, to reproduce the policies and actions of the Clinton Administration, including the accompanying mistakes, or, at worst, to serve the interests of “the Clintons” should they prove divergent from those of the Obama Administration and the nation.

This is the sort of reasoning that led to needless unhappiness the last two times Democrats were in power. Jimmy Carter”s circle regarded Johnson, who mired the nation in Vietnam and then handed the White House to Nixon, as a failure. They weren”t about to have any “Johnson people” in their White House. Clinton”s circle regarded Carter, who allowed himself to be paralyzed by a few hundred Iranian “students” and then handed the White House to Reagan, as a failure. They weren”t about to have any “Carter people” in their White House.

It didn”t seem to occur to either crowd, Carter”s or Clinton”s, that old hands, far from being eager to repeat the errors of the Administrations of which they had been a part, would be especially keen to avoid them. Also, they would know in detail what those errors were.

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates…

0935: Ohio”s prison population: fear takes control again

Ayn Rand Jeremiah Tucker shrugs:

“Your mind gives me the biggest boner, Dagny Taggart.”

He fell upon her like a savage, wielding his mouth like a machete, and in the pleasure she took from him her body became an extension of her quarterly earnings report-proof of her worthiness as a lover. His hard-on was sanction enough.

“Scream your secret passions, Hank Rearden!”

“Derivatives!”

“Yes!”

“Credit-default swaps!”

“Oh, yes! Yes!”

“Collateralized debt obligation.”

“YES! YES! YES!”

Bruce Schneier writes:

If there’s any lesson in these attacks, it’s not to focus too much on the specifics of the attacks. Of course, that’s not the way we’re programmed to think. We respond to stories, not analysis. I don’t mean to be unsympathetic; this tendency is human and these deaths are really tragic. But 18 armed people intent on killing lots of innocents will be able to do just that, and last-line-of-defense countermeasures won’t be able to stop them.

And this is the point I’ve been trying to make for years about succumbing to fear:

The initial threat may come from terrorism; the second danger comes from our response to terror.

The boogieman we’ve created in our mythology is more damaging than the mad bomber can ever be.

Via Daily Dish…

Jason Kottke ponders:

Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to “own” their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows.

The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves.

More likely, they’re discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.

Unchecked comment spam signals that the owner/moderator of the forum or blog isn’t paying attention, stimulating further improper conduct. Anonymity provides commenters with immunity from being associated with their speech and actions, making the whole situation worse… how does the community punish or police someone they don’t know?

Very quickly, the situation is out of control and your message board is the online equivalent of South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, inhabited by roving gangs armed with hate speech, fueled by the need for attention, making things difficult for those who wish to carry on useful conversations.

From Americans For Safe Access:

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a landmark decision today in which California state courts found that its medical marijuana law was not preempted by federal law. The state appellate court decision from November 28, 2007, ruled that “it is not the job of the local police to enforce the federal drug laws.”

The case, involving Felix Kha, a medical marijuana patient from Garden Grove, was the result of a wrongful seizure of medical marijuana by local police in June 2005. Medical marijuana advocates hailed today’s decision as a huge victory in clarifying law enforcement’s obligation to uphold state law.

Advocates assert that better adherence to state medical marijuana laws by local police will result in fewer needless arrests and seizures. In turn, this will allow for better implementation of medical marijuana laws not only in California, but in all states that have adopted such laws.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Plain Dealer editorial staff dressed in black today, according to staff members, as the news dribbled in that colleagues had gotten the dreaded call that they were no longer needed.

The sorrowful tone at the Plain Dealer offices reminded some news watchers of the demise of the Cleveland Press in 1982.

The names of people who received the call from Editor Susan Goldberg this morning include some well-known bylines and a number of unfamiliar names to many readers. They receive two weeks pay for every year they worked at the newspaper.

Those dismissed include David Briggs, religion writer, long-time reporters Terry Oblander and Maggie Martin, photographers Rondell Hickman and Brynne Shaw, Melissa Hebert, home section writer, Brenda Junkin, food, Janet Filmore, also a religion writer.
Others included desk and editorial people – Jennifer Gonzalez, Susan Patton, Merlene Santiago and Melissa Hebert.

We had reported here earlier the names of Sam Fulwood, Scott and Chris Stephens, Alana Baranick, Wally Guenther, Karen Sandstrom, Molly Kavanaugh, Joel Rutchick, John Campanelli, Fran Henry, Mary Vanac and Chris Seper. Some of those who decided to leave were not staff members the Plain Dealer wanted to lose.

I’ve known the pain of job loss due to financial bad times. I’d also seen the train about to leap off the tracks and was prepared to jump.

These individuals understood the risks and chose to roll the dice. They crapped out.

The question becomes now, how does the community of journalists embrace that the medium is not job?

What we all do has worth. How do we now wrestle that value away from the leeches in management and create our own prosperity?

Empty gestures of solidarity are nice. The morning after the real work begins.

Robert Reich writes:

[I]nvestors are starting to fathom the emptiness of American consumers’ wallets. Retail sales last Friday and Saturday — the first days of the Christmas buying season — were disappointing. Had retailers not discounted to the point of taking losses, sales would have been abysmal. In other words, consumers have gone on strike.

Why have they gone on strike? Not because of the difficulty of getting credit. Most consumers can barely afford to pay the interest charges on the debt they’re already carrying. Consumers have gone on strike because their earnings haven’t kept up. The recovery that officially ended December, 2007 (the National Bureau of Economic Research now tells us) was the first on record in which median earnings declined, adjusted for inflation. Since then, many people have also lost their jobs or are working part time when they’d rather be working full time, or else know they’re in danger of losing their jobs.

0833: For the record: no retreat on White House Hannukah card error

0806: For the record: no retreat on White House Hannukah card error

0725: The Plain Dealer to deal pain, plainly …and then there’s Roldo…

1126: For the record: no retreat on White House Hannukah card error

President-elect Barack Hussein Obama stands before a high wall erected by his predecessor. It is a wall built of hate and lies and crimes against the citizens of the United States of America. It is a wall that must come down and it’s falling will shake what it means to be a free person in the greatest nation our world has yet known. Who we are. What we represent. Why we count. These questions must all be answered as we retake the high ground.

No question will be more important than this: how did a nation that stood above torture, that condemned torture in its enemies, turn it’s back on 225 years of precedent and honor to become the beast so many brave men and women had given their lives to vanquish?

Andrew Sullivan writes:

How does [President-elect Barack Hussein Obama] deal with the legacy of criminal actions of his predecessor”s administration when it comes to detention, interrogation, abuse and torture of terror suspects? That has long hovered in the back of the minds of those of us who supported Obama, in large part because he alone had the moral authority to draw a line underneath the criminality of the George Bush-Dick Cheney years and restore credibility and honour to America”s antiterror policies.

Yes. President-elect Obama must deal with the in-his-face reality of an economy raped by greed and the complacency of regulators. Yes, he must extract the United States from the quagmire of Iraq. Yes, he must even either capture and try Osama bin Laden or provide proof of his death. Continue Reading »

Matthew Alexander (a nom de guerre) writes:

These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information.

I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq.

Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

[Snip…]

I know the counter-argument well — that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that’s not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques.

A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, “I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate.”

One of the most difficult tasks we face in the United States will be cleansing our nation of the stink of inhumanity fostered by the administration of President George Walker Bush. Arguments that he did what he had to do to keep us safe are just more of his bullshit.

We cannot, we must not, simply allow the past eight years to fade into history.

The boil must be lanced. The poison must be washed from our national body. Those responsible must not be allowed to retire to luxury and solitude.

Krishnakumar P and Vicky Nanjappa write:

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: “Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,” he said.

Via The Daily Dish…

Ta-Nishi Coates writes:

But nationalism–be it monoracial, biracial, or multiracial–has no respect for actual individual humans. And nationalism is really Arana’s point–she simply seeks to substitute the strictures of one group (a charmed, rainbow of genes and cultures) and for another (a presumably, pure strain from straight out the Congo). But asserting that Obama isn’t black but biracial, is really no better than asserting that he’s black, but not biracial.

The arrogance of both arguments are quite stunning. As an African-American, I’d think myself far, far out of place to tell a dude whose mother was a Russian Jew, and father was a Muslim Arab, that he had no right to call himself a Jew or a Muslim or an Arab or even a Russiuan. What the fuck do I know about his life?

Everything flows from respect. Tiger Woods calls himself multiracial. The moral thing to do is not to launch into all sorts of diatribes about shame and blackness, but accept him as he accepts himself. But that cuts both ways. Barack Obama calls himself a biracial black man. The human thing to do, is nod your head and say “Got it.” The human thing is to respect these dudes. Respect our own ignorance of their lives. And most of all, respect their humanity.

We’re writing extensively about the death of Walmart temporary employee Jdimytai Damour over at The Writing On The Wal, but this story has import far beyond the purveyor of cheap plastic crap from China. Damour’s story is one piece in the legacy of President George Bush.

For eight years our president has told us to shop or the terrorists win. I have to think it warms their hearts in those mountain retreats knowing what such idiocy has wrought.

From The New York Times:

Live within our means and save: This new commandment has entered the conversation, colliding with the deeply embedded imperative to spend. And yet much of the distress is less the product of extravagance than the result of the fact that in many households the means are nowhere near enough for traditional middle-class lives.

Wages for most Americans have fallen in real terms over the last eight years. Pensions have been turned into 401(k) plans that have just relinquished half their value to an angry market. Health benefits have been downgraded or eliminated altogether. Working hours are being slashed, and full-time workers are having to settle for jobs through temp agencies.

Indeed, this was the situation for the unfortunate man who found himself working at the Valley Stream Wal-Mart at 5 a.m. Friday, a temp at a company emblematic of low wages and weak benefits, earning his dollars by trying to police an unruly crowd worried about missing out.

In a sense, the American economy has become a kind of pi̱ata Рlots of treats in there, but no guarantee that you will get any, making people prone to frenzy and sending some home bruised.

It seemed fitting then, in a tragic way, that the holiday season began with violence fueled by desperation; with a mob making a frantic reach for things they wanted badly, knowing they might go home empty-handed.

Americans have known what it means to be empty-handed; but we have never been empty-hearted. May the death of Jdimytai Damour remind us that the former is nothing and the latter is everything.