Good Morning!
Photo by joanneleon. December, 2012
What are we going to do about it? First of all, admit that there is an unevenness on the playing field. So in the even rules that do not take into account unevenness are unfair rules by definition. It's unfair by definition because it ignores the fact that one is standing in a hole and one is standing on a hilltop. It's like ham and eggs justice. It sounds even and it smells even and when you cook it, it blends as if it were one. Whenever, there's a vote between hogs and chickens on ham and eggs sandwiches, hogs always vote against it, chickens always love it. They can drop an egg and move on. Hogs have to drop a leg and can't go further. It is not even. It's a kind of ham and egg justice.
-- Jesse Jackson
lonnie donegan ham n eggs 78 rpm
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News and Opinion
Ham & Egg Justice Quotes of the Day
Publicly, it sounded like the White House and House Republicans had gotten nowhere by Tuesday night.
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But, despite the public posturing, the fact that very little has leaked about the private conversations between the president and Boehner is a signal that there may be real movement behind the scenes. Publicly, however, the only news out of the latest round of negotiations is the lowering of the White House's tax revenue request and, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the news that another part of the tax code is on the table ...link
The White House has told Republicans it would include an overhaul of the corporate-tax code as part of any deal to reduce the deficit, people familiar with the talks said, a move to court business groups as budget negotiations intensify.
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The White House's corporate-tax suggestion wasn't specific, according to officials familiar with the offer, other than committing to overhaul the corporate tax code in 2013. White House officials, in making the suggestion, cited a corporate-tax plan the administration unveiled in February but said they weren't wedded to any specifics.
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As part of its budget proposal, the White House also slightly lowered its target for new tax revenue to $1.4 trillion, down from Mr. Obama's initial offer of $1.6 trillion, officials said. It retained items from an earlier offer that had irked Republicans, included new stimulus spending and an increase in the U.S.'s borrowing limit. ...link
Tuesday's offer from Boehner follows his remarks on the House floor in which he called on President Obama to identify what spending cuts the White House will accept as part of a "balanced approach"
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The White House responded by outlining Obama's proposals, including cutting $340 million from Medicare over a decade, and $250 billion from other programs. ...link
A 'National Attack': Michigan Passes 'Right-to-Work' Law
Police in riot gear confront thousands as legislation seen as blow to collective bargaining power, middle class passes
Republican Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law contentious "right-to-work" legislation on Tuesday after tear-gas wielding police and over ten thousand people protesting the attack on labor converged at the state Capitol and vowed that the day's action was just the beginning.
Snyder's signature makes the state the 24th to have a law dubbed by critics as "right-to-work for less."
2012 Afghan Fighting Season Data Are In: Daniel Davis Was Right on Surge Failure
As the “fighting season” for the tenth full year of US forces being in Afghanistan comes to a close, the Defense Department has released its most recent report (pdf, required every Friedman Unit by law) on “progress” in the war. Although the military does its best, as always, to couch its report in language describing progress against goals which always must be redefined in order to claim any progress, those who have been paying attention knew from the report prepared early this year by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis that the vaunted surge of troops in Afghanistan, despite being billed as guaranteed to work as well as the Iraq surge, has been a complete failure.
They fail because they are so godawful and greedy.
Let us address the declining fortunes of today's mainstream mass media.
(Yes, I can hear your pained screams of "Nooooo ... we don't want to!" We really must, however, because it's not about them, but us — about our ability to be at least quasi-informed about who's-doing-what-to-whom-and-why, in order for us to be a self-governing people. So buckle-up, here we go.)
The honchos of America's establishment media are quick to blame such external causes as the Internet for their problems. But if they looked internally, they might notice that they're damn near eaten-up with a bad case of conventional wisdomitis. The problem with conventional wisdom is that more often than not it's nothing more than the contrived "wisdom" of the corporate powers.
The Zero Dark Thirty debate continues.
(Ben Wiseman, NYT article)
Osama bin Laden: How the new film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ has reignited the torture debate
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni sparked the discussion Sunday in his piece titled “Bin Laden, Torture and Hollywood,” which began: “I’m betting Dick Cheney will love the new movie Zero Dark Thirty.”
“No waterboarding, no bin Laden: that’s what Zero Dark Thirty appears to suggest,” Bruni writes.
On Tuesday, Peter Bergen, one of two authors who have written about the CIA’s hunt, lamented that the movie gives a “misleading picture” that coercive techniques were essential to the Al Qaeda leader’s capture.
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Zero Dark Thirty by no means glorifies the use of torture but instead depicts its horror up close and as Bruni notes, the film will likely be a “Rorschach test,” with each side of the torture debate seeing what they want.
But for the greater movie-going public it will be hard not to walk away with the impression that this type of interrogation was a necessary evil – at the very least, an essential part of the CIA’s tool box when forced to operate in what Cheney famously dubbed “the dark side.”
Glenn's update from Tuesday. It is still stirring up a lot of conversation in the comments. There are 1104 comments right now and I could swear I saw a number larger than that earlier today so I wonder if the can and did delete some entirely. I could be mistaken about the number though.
Zero Dark Thirty: new torture-glorifying film wins raves
UPDATE II [Tues.]
A small flotilla of movie critics attacked this column yesterday on the ground that I had reviewed this film without seeing it, despite the fact that (obviously anticipating this objection) I explicitly declared near the beginning that I was doing no such thing and instead explained that I was commenting on the reactions to the film and the defenses from the filmmakers. I officially give up on trying to convince anyone who still doesn't see this point - commenters to this column had no trouble understanding and discussing what it was about and what it was not about - but Freddie deBoer has an excellent reaction to all of this, along with his commentary on a defense of the film from Spencer Ackerman, that is well worth reading. Relatedly, Jon Schwarz has a one-minute clip of the film featuring the film's hero that he critiques for factual (in)accuracy.
Other reactions to the commentary from film reviewers from those who haven't yet seen the film was offered yesterday by NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen ("WTF is Kathryn Bigelow doing inserting torture into her film, Zero Dark Thirty, if it wasn't used to get Bin Laden?"); Mother Jones' Adam Serwer ("The critical acclaim Zero Dark Thirty is already receiving suggests that it may do what Karl Rove could not have done with all the money in the world: embed in the popular imagination the efficacy, even the necessity, of torture"); The Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan ("Bigelow constructs a movie upon a grotesque lie"); and The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky ("Can I just say that I am equally bothered, and indeed even more bothered, by the fact that the movie opens with 9-11").
If writers at major media outlets who review the film all say the film shows torture being helpful in finding bin Laden - all while the film's director runs around the country praising herself for her journalistic approach to the film while the film's screenwriter defends this artistic license to depict the non-existent value of torture (as he did to Filkins) - then people are going to talk about that, and they should. They're also going to talk about reviewers who simultaneously gush about the film while noting that it falsely depicts torture as helping find bin Laden, and they should do that also.
That so many reviewers walked away with a pro-torture message from the film - that torture was key to finding bin Laden - means that large numbers of viewers likely will as well, regardless of the after-the-fact claimed intent of the filmmakers. That, by itself, is highly problematic and worthy of commentary.
I wasn't previously aware of this rule imposing a blackout on discussing film reviews that appear in major media outlets prior to the film's opening. It's an inane prohibition, and particularly strange to watch film critics, who write these pre-opening reviews, lead the way in imposing this blackout period on discussing what they write.
Heh! Does this guy post around here?
Zero Dark Thirty's Morality Brigade
Zero Dark Thirty doesn't even come out until next week, but Kathryn Bigelow's much-hailed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden is already provoking outrage in some quarters for allegedly "glorifying"—OK, sometimes it's "celebrating"—torture. As all too bloody usual, the loudest howls are coming from people who haven't actually seen ZD30, some of whom—yes, Andrew Sullivan, I mean you —really ought to know better. Ginning up controversies about movies without bothering to watch them first is really more Bill Donohue and the Catholic League's sort of thing, and does Sullivan want to be in that company?
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So, first off, yes: Zero Dark Thirty does depict a circa-2003 torture session as providing the first murky clue in the long chain of them that eventually leads to bin Laden. Plenty of people in a position to know—e.g., ex-CIA director Leon Panetta—have said that just ain't so. On the other hand, Mark Bowden's convincingly reported (to my eyes) book about bin Laden's killing, The Finish, goes along with Bigelow and Boal, which doesn't mean he/they are right and everybody else is wrong. We don't know who the filmmakers did and didn't talk to while they were researching the story. It's possible their sources were the same as Bowden's and they decided to go with that version of events—events which, I'm pretty sure, we won't know the conclusive truth about for a good long while, if ever.
It's interesting to find this at CNN. And the author of this piece
did see the movie. In fact he saw both and early release and the final release. The torture scenes were even worse in the early release and were toned down and yet they are still very long, intense and dominating scenes.
'Zero Dark Thirty': Did torture really net bin Laden?
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is a CNN national security analyst and author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad" and "The Longest War: America's Enduring Conflict with al-Qaeda," books that this story draws upon.
The compelling story told in the film captures a lot that is true about the search for al Qaeda's leader but also distorts the story in ways that could give its likely audience of millions of Americans the misleading picture that coercive interrogation techniques used by the CIA on al Qaeda detainees -- such as waterboarding, physical abuse and sleep deprivation -- were essential to finding bin Laden.
This week, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee plans to vote on whether to approve the as-yet unreleased findings of a 6,000-page report about its three-year investigation into the secret CIA interrogation program that is depicted in "Zero Dark Thirty."
This report promises to be the definitive assessment of the intelligence value of the CIA's coercive interrogation techniques. After the examination of millions of pages of evidence, the chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have publicly stated that coercive interrogation techniques such as waterboarding did not provide the information that led to bin Laden.
But the fact is that about half an hour of the beginning of "Zero Dark Thirty" consists of scenes of an exhausted, bloodied al Qaeda detainee named Ammar who is strung to the ceiling with ropes; beaten; forced to wear a dog collar while crawling around attached to a leash; stripped naked in the presence of Maya, the female CIA analyst; blasted with heavy metal music so he is deprived of sleep; forced to endure crude waterboardings; and locked into a coffin-like wooden crate.
These visceral scenes are, of course, far more dramatic than the scene where a CIA analyst says she has dug up some information in an old file that will prove to be a key to finding bin Laden.
[Emphasis added]
Hard hitting argument. I tend to think he's right and not only that, I think it applies not only to torture but to killing innocent civilians by drone attacks too.
bad faith and Zero Dark Thirty
Instead Greenwald has a very basic point, one that is being roundly ignored: a film that has repeatedly and proudly been sold as "documentary" and "journalistic" contains a lie of profound importance. The movie, by all accounts, shows torture as being an indispensable part of the capture of bin Laden, an idea that has been roundly debunked and specifically denied by many people on the inside of the government. (Adam Serwer, with typical thoroughness and fairness, has the run-down.) To say that your movie is "a hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic," as the writer of the film did, when your movie depicts the use of torture as essential to captuing bin Laden is to tell a lie. And in a country of vitriolic anti-Muslim hatred, a dangerous lie. Whether you've seen the film or not.
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It's not that I think liberals support torture. No, I think liberals want to be forced to support torture. What liberals want is ultimately to do what conservative hawks want to do, but only after experts and leaders assure them that they have no choice. They want extreme events to make the choice for them. That's why every discussion of torture always descends into some absurd hypothetical where you know that there's a ticking time bomb and you know that a terrorist in your custody has info and you know that you can get that info and stop that bomb if you torture him. They devise these incredibly complex scenarios because they need them to take away their personal choice. That's why writers like Spencer Ackerman exist, to present the proper level of squeamishness and showy moral grappling-- to say that these scenes "can make a viewer ashamed to be American, in the context of a movie whose ending scene makes viewers very, very proud to be American"-- before the torture happens anyway. The key is to go through the moral indigestion but to eventually get to the all-American pride. There's a whole cottage industry, like that, for fretting liberals who want to get to the tough guy routine in the end.
If Zero Dark Thirty shows torture as the key to killing bin Laden, that's what it's for, and I'm sure performing that service will prove very profitable. It will inevitably be folded into a narrative used to perpetuate violence in the Muslim world. That narrative will come wrapped in the flag and shouting about freedom. That's what it means to be an American today, to talk about defending principles you swiftly abandon in the process of defending them. And that's the message of American liberals today, like the film critics showing their profound sophistication as they snark at Greenwald: do the bad thing. Just make us feel that we have no choice.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
The Evening Blues
One Cowardly Nerd
Dean Martin - How do you like your eggs in the morning?
Remember when progressive debate was about our values and not about a "progressive" candidate? Remember when progressive websites championed progressive values and didn't tell progressives to shut up about values so that "progressive" candidates can get elected?
Come to where the debate is not constrained by oaths of fealty to persons or parties.
Come to where the pie is served in a variety of flavors.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." ~ Noam Chomsky
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