Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Technical Difficulties

Tech problems led to the loss of the very end of this diavlog--we apologize.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Anne, I did not care for what you had to say.

Regards,

ISA

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Ann not Anne.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

no, she changed it cuz she's religious

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

I enjoyed the part about American Idol, even though I have yet to watch the show. I must concur with Althouse giving special mention to the gay guys on her blog. They add an interesting and welcome perspective. These two bloggining Divas work well together.

Trey

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Ann,
You might want to read David Brooks on Obama's torture/detention policy. He seems much closer to the truth than you are.
He says there was a Cheney torture policy for 3 years, and then a gradual rolling back of the Cheney policy to a Rice/Hadley policy, and that Obama is continuing (with some tweaks) the latter policy, while Cheney explicitly attacks Obama and implicitly attacks the later Bush policy. This seems much closer to right than Ann's seemingly faith-based claims that Obama is going to be just like Bush (meaning Bush-Cheney, apparently).

Brooks objects to Obama's repudiation of Bush's policy, on the grounds that it's unfair and partisan, given that he is keeping the broad outline of the later Bush strategy.
I think this overlooks the fact that the Bush II policy, like the Bush-Cheney policy, was implemented quietly, without any repudiation of the insane Bush-Cheney policy. THAT original policy was one the Bush administration could not or would not denounce in the terms it needed to be denounced in. Obama can turn the page, which is important for national security, and total fairness to the later Bush regine should rightly take a back seat to that.

Second, one thing that both Brooks and Ann seem to miss totally is the difference on issues of process. The Bush administration sought to do everything in secret by executive order. They engaged Congress only when the Congress was already engaged or when they were told they had to by the Supreme Court. Obama is attempting to make the policy in a more democratic way.

Where does Ann get her certainty that Obama will play the same word-games as Bush (we do not torture by definition)? I have seen no evidence of that kind of blatant dishonesty so far, and Ann, of course, never presents any -- the very idea of presenting any seems not to occur to her.

I really wonder how she can be a law professor. She doesn't believe in providing evidence for her views. She can't understand Obama's careful nuance, his attempt to balance two sides of an argument, and she'll accept any horseshit from demagogues and serial liars like Dick Cheney so long as it's phrased in simple direct sentences that a five year old could formulate and understand. She seems to see opinion as a purely emotive affair with no connection to reason at all. Ann, are you a law professor or a Dachsund?

Note to Ann's interlocutors: When she says something ridiculous, don't get embarrassed and try to change the subject or just say "I guess we disagree", just politely ask her for her evidence and see what happens.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Yeah, that was sort of the low-point of Althouse's argumentation. Confronted with evidence that she was wrong she replied (without a note of doubt or uncertainty) that she still believed Obama would act like Bush anyway. Not a very flattering reaction IMO.

Which gets me to the Obama = Bush thing. It was entertaining a couple months ago, when the alternative was fawning comparisons to Lincoln or FDR, but it's starting to get really played out and insipid. He's been in office long enough that you can find real stuff to criticize without having to make absurd stretches and dubious predictions. At least the people comparing him to Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini are putting some effort into it.

It's been a while since 2001 but IIRC Althouse is also wrong when she said that people were constantly finding fault with Bush. That's without even correcting for a much more divisive election or a period of relative calm.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Nonsense.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

it true i red it on da internets

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Great line! Though perhaps your division is overly binary ;)

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

That really was an astonishing sequence at around minute 16 (sorry, life is too short to go back and dingalink it). Althouse makes a, shall we say, counterintuitive assertion, provides no evidence whatsoever nor evinces any awareness that the burden of proof is on her, is confronted with evidence to the contrary, and shrugs it off with a "oh, I don't believe that for a second." Too bad she didn't play the "well I'm just trying to stir things up" card to complete the Althouse drinking game hat trick.

I don't know why anyone agrees to appear on bh.tv with her.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

I won't listen to Althouse. Ev-er. But I did read the Brooks piece. He makes a good argument that the Bushies, chastened by the Supreme Court and an absence of WMDs in Iraq, and better advised by elders from Bush-1-land, had already distanced themselves from hardcore Cheneyism, certainly by 2006.

I have a slightly different take on it: the whole fucking government flipped out after 9/11 and the far right neo-cons got everything they wanted. They were drunk on the barbarism of aggressive warfare, and most of them gradually sobered up.

It amounts to the same thing though. Cheney is now left with just a populist pro-torture base. The neo-con intellectuals who stirred the pot in the name of coercive democracy have retreated to rationalization, revisionism and the woodwork. It's basically Dick and Joe the Plumber.

So yes, it's preposterous to conclude that Obama will be "just like Bush." In fact, one of Obama's biggest advantages is that almost anyone would like like a genius and great statesperson following the incompetent and idiotic W. And Obama is NOT just anyone.

Well, Ann aside, I think there is SOME evidence. Obama has not walked away from rendition, which IS a euphemism for "they'll do the torture for us, and we can maybe even be in the room." Also, the revival of military tribunals is a word game. And then there is the walkback from justice and due process on the issue of permanent preventative detention of suspects who have never been charged with or convicted of anything.

The conventional right-wing wisdom has it that Obama the reality-facing president is a different man than Obama the inexperienced candidate. Again, I view it a little differently: Obama is now surrounded by a group of people he had almost zero contact with throughout his life: high-level career militarists. They have their flattery, their shiny medals, their crisp uniforms, their swagger, their homoeroticism and their charm. They wouldn't fool Martin Luther King or Gandhi or even an older George McGovern or Jimmy Carter (both of whom, after all, had BEEN in the military). But Obama is no MLK and no Gandhi, and it remains to be seen if he's even Jimmy Carter.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Obama reached a new level of cleverness at Notre Dame by not stating that babies were punishment comparable to STDs, as he did on the campaign trail.

And if neocons are 'drunk on barbarism', please describe those who murder strangers over cartoons, reporters for being jewish and teen girls for shaming their families.

Maybe the most awesome quote on these boards ever. Happy Memorial Day!

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse): Toobin on Chief Justice Roberts
 

Jeffrey Toobin’s profile of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. in The New Yorker of May 25, 2009 is incomplete, misleading, and in one respect inaccurate.

The article is incomplete in several respects. First, it says nothing about Chief Justice Roberts’s formidable lawyering skills. Although the Chief Justice was regarded by many as one of the finest appellate advocates in the nation, the article says nothing about the quality of his performance in oral argument or the quality of his appellate briefs. Second, the article says almost nothing about then-Circuit Judge Roberts’s work as a judge on the DC Circuit: nothing about his collegiality or the quality of his writing or of his performance at oral argument. Third, respecting the Chief Justice’s Supreme Court tenure, the article says nothing about the quality of the Chief Justice’s opinions, and little, other than a mention of one of his annual reports and his conduct at the Court’s attorney-admission ceremony, about his administrative work respecting the Court or the Judicial Conference of the United States. The result is that Toobin’s article fails to discuss what are arguably the most significant aspects of the Chief Justice’s career.

Moreover, Toobin’s article proffers incomplete and slanted characterizations of cases to bolster its argument. For example, the article summarizes the Court’s ruling in Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., as one that “overturned a ninety-six-year-old precedent in antitrust law and thus made it harder to prove collusion by corporations.” While that is correct as far as it goes, the article fails to mention the Court’s rationale for setting aside the older case: that many economics scholars, as well as writings of the American Bar Association Section of Antitrust Law, contend that the practice, resale price maintenance, forbidden by the older case, ultimately benefits consumers, that is, ordinary citizens. One may disagree with that rationale, but neglecting to mention it leaves readers with the false impression that the welfare of ordinary people was not a primary factor in the Court’s decision.

Regarding the Court’s decision to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in Gonzalez v. Carhart, the article fails to underscore that the majority opinion, which the Chief Justice joined, by upholding the law showed respect for a policy determination of Congress, and for the will of the American people, to whom Congress is accountable. Of Ledbetter v. Goodyear, Toobin’s article states that it was “brought by a sympathetic grandmother who had been paid far less than men doing the same work at the tire company,” and that the Court’s ruling “imposed seemingly insurmountable new burdens on plaintiffs in employment-discrimination lawsuits.” The article thus erroneously suggests that the Court’s ruling changed the law to thwart meritorious claims. The article neglects to mention that the Court denied Ms. Ledbetter relief because she had failed timely to file her discrimination claim, and that in so ruling, the Court merely followed precedent, including a 1977 opinion in United Air Lines, Inc. v. Evans, by Justice Stevens. That is, in Ledbetter the Court, acting as the “umpire” of the Chief Justice’s nomination testimony, rather than changing the law, simply applied existing law, consistent with the Court’s limited constitutional role. While one may disagree with the Court’s rationale in Ledbetter, to suggest that the Court’s ruling in Ledbetter amounted to legislating from the bench misleads the reader.

Respecting accuracy, Toobin’s characterization of the Chief Justice’s 2006 annual report on the federal judiciary implies that the annual reports of the late Chief Justice Rehnquist failed to include requests for increases in judicial compensation. That is inaccurate: Chief Justice Rehnquist consistently argued for improvements in judicial compensation in his annual reports, as those linked from the Court’s Website, and those from earlier years, attest. Since Congress repeatedly declined to act on Chief Justice Rehnquist’s judicial compensation requests, Toobin’s characterization of Chief Justice Roberts’s 2006 compensation request as evidencing “blindness” seems unwarranted.

In addition, Toobin’s article expresses a puzzling view of the Chief Justice’s purported ideology. The article casts the Chief Justice’s statements and rulings in favor of the rule of law and of non-political adjudication as indicative of political extremism. Yet the record shows that the Chief Justice favors a moderate and principled view, held by many ordinary Americans: that Congress and the federal executive–whose members are elected by and accountable to the people–rather than the unelected judiciary, should engage in policy making. Not extremism, but respect for the separation of powers, the political process, and the will of the people, distinguishes the Chief Justice’s judicial philosophy.

Considered in light of these omissions and error, Toobin’s portrayal of Chief Justice Roberts lacks balance and fairness. The Chief Justice, one of our most distinguished jurists, deserves far better.

Robert Richards

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Perhaps Obama isn't a dupe at all, he may be a true believer. He never claimed innocence or pacifism. If so, what strategy do you employ to influence him otherwise? Do you have hope?

It seems that it doesn't matter whether you call it Bush or Obama... The President of these United States, when in need, must first and foremost protect with military might. Opinions of said need differ, but selective readings of the constitution may apply.
WWC(arter)D? If not Jesus, MLK or Gandhi.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Shame... incapable of listening to Ann Althouse. She's not even a right-winger.

Your latter points are exactly what Ann Althouse is talking about when she means to say that President Obama will be a lot like President Bush. She's not arguing that he will be exactly like him in style or in every substantive matter, but in many substantive matters Obama will only be caring on with what Bush did.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

I'm curious to what extent he believes in the Bush doctrine of US exceptionalism. I would expect him to be a skeptic, but all the flag waving, rides on Air Force One and hails-to-the-chief must be very intoxicating.

I'd like to think Obama can remain truly thoughtful and even humble. (Was Lincoln?) But he lives in a bubble, surrounded by sycophants, careerists, connivers, warmongers, crooks and megalomaniacs. And those are just the Democrats!

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Even Jimmy Carter? You just darkened my day Wonderment.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

I should add that I think Jimmy Carter was the best US president of the 20th century.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

I certainly worry that your dark interpretation could be true. But I don't think it's clear that a rendition policy is necessarily a torture outsourcing policy. As I understand it, there are people who, if they were not dangerous, we would not return to Saudi Arabia or to Egypt -- we'd regard them as deserving asylum. But in the case of terrorists, although we don't like returning them to their country of origin, we prefer that to our other options (living with them or attempting to come up with a criminal case against them). Of course, a rendition program could be (and has been) employed as torture outsourcing, but I'm not sure it has to be exactly the same thing.

Prisoners of war don't have to be convicted of anything, of course. If we could have reason to believe that the "war on terror" would last just five years, say, and if we could be clear about the "battlefield", then there would be no need for a conviction -- so long as they were treated according to the Geneva conventions. The problem arises with the amorphous nature of the conflict. I find indefinite (not really "permanent") detention very troubling, but the domestic court system is not the only institution here. The institutions and rules governing prisoners of war seem at least in many cases to be the most relevant ones. But if they are to work, then they need some kind of revision. that's what Obama is promising to do, and he is willing to do it in the open and with the cooperation of Congress. Since the agreements are international, perhaps we need to convene another Geneva convention.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Seriously? Have you looked at where he's ranked on the list according to Presidential historians?

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

You make some good points for a more sanguine reading of Obama policy as articulated so far. But rendition remains very murky, despite administation assertions to the contrary.

How do we know they are terrorists and where did we pick them up? The Bush doctrine was that the entire planet was a battlefield in the War on Terror. For example, you could kidnap someone in a sovereign country -- say, a Pakistani in Bolivia, -- and ship her to Egypt, NOT the country of origin, for "interrogation" and detention, not a hearing or trial. If the intent o were simply to rid the US of the custody problem, there is no need to resort to channels other than an immigration judge with authority to deport undesirables. Rendition is predicated on the notion that the third party nation will do some kind of dirty work that we are unprepared to do.

That is, to quote the Yooists, a quaint notion. Bush conceived of the War on Terror as perpetual, and AFAIK there is no reason to believe Obama disagrees.

Only if we are violating them. Or want to enervate them. I agree that the problem is international. The US is not the only democracy to torture or detain people illegally. Israel also comes to mind, and there are others. Israel, for example, has several hundred Palestinians under "administrative detention" (and has a long history of torture and "enhanced interrogation.") Other countries have done much better with very serious terrorist problems. Spain, for example, has been combating Basque terrorists for decades, and more recently Al Qaeda as well: no torture, no detention without trials, no death penalty, no life without parole.

The US can go in the direction of Spain or the direction of Israel. Obama is getting through the easy part now: reversing the most egregious violations of the Bush human rights debacle. But many challenges remain.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Are you sure you're rating him as a President or as a post-President left-wing, champion of human rights celebrity?

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Yes, I have. I'm not impressed with the rankings. In the 2009 CSPAN poll, slaveholder GW is ranked #2; slaveholder Jefferson is ranked #7;Genocidal slaveTRADER and crook Andrew Jackson is ranked #13; the only man on Earth to order a nuclear bomb dropped on civilians is ranked #5. Need I go on?

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

ohhhh, i forgot to consult my "I'm insanely left wing" handbook before asking.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Oops, I forgot that opposing slavery and the mass murder of civilians were insane left wing views.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

let's see......dozens of experts vs. a guy who is really biased. hmmmm....that is a tough one. although, i did ask Denville steve what he thought and he said "G. W. Bush" and since he's the equivalent of you on the other side i'll compromise and rank them 1 and 2, respectively. how long do you think it'll take wikipedia to change it back after i "go on record"? 5 seconds?

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

You do have a point in that I am "rating" according to values I apply to the overall person.

The confusion we're having is because presidential historians' assessments are only valuable in the narrow context of the presidency itself and mostly from the narrow viewpoint of US national interests.

In other words, the historians will look at the context of Jefferson's election. Could someone with an abolitionist agenda get elected? Of course not, so Jefferson must be appraised given the political constraints of the time.

How did Truman do? Well, from the national interest point of view, he got the Japanese to surrender and saved American military lives.

But if you look at Jefferson from the slave's point of view or look at Truman from the Hiroshima victim's point of view, you will assess the humanity of these presidents differently.

So the historian may say Jefferson was one of our best presidents. But I -- who think the great moral issue of the first 90 years of the country was the abolition of slavery -- conclude that Jefferson flunked as a human being. (Actually, a better argument can be made for Truman, given that he inherited the WWII from Roosevelt and there was immense barbarism on all sides.)

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

I see where you're coming from, but I profoundly disagree with you. I abhor judging our ancestors by today's standards, i.e., slavery is bad and dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was bad, so on and so forth. Jefferson was just a part of the southern economic system which made it difficult to not own slaves or free them. If he had been born and raised in Massachusetts, his actions would have been different probably. You make the perfect point against your own argument by both congratulating Truman on ending the war and saving peoples' lives, and then giving him them thumbs down with the way he did it, like he had another choice... because whatever choice he made meant slaughtering Japanese people one way or another (Americans too of course).

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Ok, we can agree to disagree on that. I think slavery was always bad -- then, now, whenever.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

I do too, Jefferson did as well, but if I had lived in the antebellum South, and owned enough property, I probably would have owned slaves too because that was how large property owners made their land profitable. Even free blacks owned slaves. The only people who didn't own slaves in the South were the white trash farmers who were too poor to own slaves.

Julius Caesar butchered peopled by the thousands and enslaved many of the ones he hadn't butchered. Is he not still estimable? Socrates was a free man who lived in a slave based economic system. He didn't try to end the slave economy of the Hellenistic world. Should we look down upon him because of this? James Madison, a slave owner, wrote the Constitution. The Constitution is the same document President Barack Obama upholds and defends this very hour, and the same document that allows for Barack Obama to be the President of the United States. James Madison is less of a human being because he lawfully owned slaves? Does his humanity not live on through the Constitution he wrote and the country he helped to found? The country that President Barack Obama leads today? Rhetorical questions.

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

That doesn't make it right.

That doesn't make it right.

That doesn't make it right.

Ironically, the people of Jefferson's beloved Virginia disagree with your position:

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Hanna - LOVED the way you powered through Ann's MANY interruptions. You learned the hard way that is what you have to do. Good for you!

About those interruptions
 

@willmybasilgrow You may be interested to know that before the recording began I told Hanna I wanted her to interrupt me. I encouraged it, because I think friendly overlapping is good for conversation. I like diavlogs with casual overtalking rather than the patient endurance of sequential monologues.

Prissy folk who think it's wrong or rude to overlap are, to me, boring. So I want to diavlog with someone who feels comfortable and, really, energized by this kind of conversation. Therefore, I ask for interrupting (and vigorous argument). Some diavloggers can't or won't do it, and I try to avoid those pairings.

That said, some of the overtalking on this diavlog is caused by the technical problem at my end. My recording kept skipping ahead, dropping some of what I was saying and making Hanna's side not match up. The tech people tried to fix the problem to the extent that they could, but it's not exactly right.

By the way, did you know that linguistic studies show that women tend to speak in this overlapping style much more than men do? So, let me add that your objection to my style could be some unconscious misogyny. I want you to contemplate that.

Re: About those interruptions
 

Will do.

-Miss Priss

Re: About those interruptions
 

O.K. then.... pointing at Ann

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

you've been resorting to some really weak Appeals to Authority lately in your mocking, dismissive responses - it is a poor fit with your attitude and style.

step up your game!

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

true...but some of these dorks need to be throttled just a wee bit harder than the rest;)

Re: Crushing the Puppy Edition (Hanna Rosin & Ann Althouse)
 

Of course it doesn't make it right... cause it is 2009 and we live now. Who knows how we would have lived our lives in the antebellum South.

Virginia's resolution is hollow cause nobody from that time period is alive today and had absolutely nothing to do with slavery. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington probably appreciate that the United States is a much better country (thanks to their Constitution, their ideas, and their actions), but they probably think it is stupid for people not ever involved with to apologize for it. An apology for segregation would have been/would be more appropriate (although I wasn't around for segregation either and I parents did their part in helping to end it).

If I was from Mississippi I would have voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State flag, for example.

A probably useless admonition, considering the target
 

Stay classy ...

... and in case you miss the link at the bottom of that post, here it is again.