Conservative media's take on torture: A
laughing matter

post from Media Matters for America on 21 April 2009 06:47:32 PM. © Media Matters for America

Following President Obama's release of four previously classified Justice Department memos that had authorized the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees -- including "stress positions," "cramped confinement," "sleep deprivation," and "the waterboard" -- numerous conservative media figures have downplayed, mocked, and jeered the notion that those practices constitute torture. For instance, during the April 17 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh asserted:[...]

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Epic Fail: O'Reilly tries his hand at comedy

post from Crooks and Liars on 21 April 2009 06:45:22 PM. © Crooks and Liars

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Bill O'Reilly must be feeling a bit sensitive these days about the ongoing mockery of his work over at Comedy Central in the form of Jon Stewart's Daily Show and Stephen Colbert's show, which is essentially a running parody of O'Reilly anyway.

Last night, he even deigned to respond -- first, to Stewart, with smug, self-serving BS, and then to Colbert by attempting comedy. Which, as you can see, might be funny to someone with long-term dementia, but otherwise ... well, Bill, don't quit your day job.

Actually, the self-serving crap was really quite funny:

O'Reilly: Like Mr. Stewart, we like to poke a little fun -- but we're not hateful. Unlike Jon, we give the entire story, because our audience wants that.

That gave me quite a chuckle.

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Scientists 'disappointed, upset,' and
'consternated' that Bush officials misused their work to justify torture.

post from Think Progress on 21 April 2009 06:39:00 PM. © Think Progress

In the past week, at least three scientists have come out and objected to their work on sleep deprivation being used by the CIA and Justice Department to justify torture. In one of his 2005 memos, the OLC's Steven Bradbury said that sleep deprivation causes "at most only relatively moderate decreases in pain tolerance." But one of the scholars, Dr. Bernd Kundermann from the University of Marburg, pointed out that that he was "working with healthy volunteers and didn't deprive them of sleep for more than one day without allowing them to recover." Similarly, from Dr. S. Hakki Onen from the Hôpital Gériatrique A. Charial:

"[The study subjects] were distracted from sleeplessness by playing different games, or watching soccer matches. They could eat, drink, read, and move about as they wished. [From] the American documents we learn that sleep deprivation spanned from 70 to 120 hours -- and set maximum limits of 180 hours for the hardest resisters, which is over a full week without sleep," Onen said. "In other words, they discuss starting the sleep deprivation process at nearly double the maximum we set for ethical reasons."
Onen compared the CIA's use of his study results to the overdosing of medication. "In a manner, it's like giving a drug to a patient: if you administer it in small doses for therapeutic reasons, it helps them. If you give it in huge volumes, it becomes toxic -- and can even kill them," he said.

As Onen notes, the Justice Department determined that "the maximum allowable period of sleep deprivation allowed under the CIA interrogation program was 264 hours, though no detainee was actually deprived of sleep for more than 180 hours, or seven and a half days."

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Scientists ‘disappointed, upset,’ and
‘consternated’ that Bush officials misused their work to justify torture.

post from Think Progress on 21 April 2009 06:39:00 PM. © Think Progress

"[The study subjects] were distracted from sleeplessness by playing different games, or watching soccer matches. They could eat, drink, read, and move about as they wished. [From] the American documents we learn that sleep deprivation spanned from 70 to 120 hours -- and set maximum limits of 180 hours for the hardest resisters, which is over a full week without sleep," Onen said. "In other words, they discuss starting the sleep deprivation process at nearly double the maximum we set for ethical reasons."
Onen compared the CIA's use of his study results to the overdosing of medication. "In a manner, it's like giving a drug to a patient: if you administer it in small doses for therapeutic reasons, it helps them. If you give it in huge volumes, it becomes toxic -- and can even kill them," he said.

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What Red State Explains and Doesn't Explain

post from TPMCafe on 21 April 2009 06:35:00 PM. © TPMCafe

Andrew Gelman's 2008 book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do is an outstanding work of political science, rigorous yet accessible to the quantitatively inclined non-academic.

Along with uncovering much that is new regarding voting patterns, the book reaffirms some old truths that have tended to be glossed over in recent years by more impressionistic observers, such as David Brooks, with his sociological portraits of affluent coastal Democrats and economically humbler inland Republicans.

For example, Gelman finds that the party that emphasizes tax-cutting, the GOP, tends to appeal more to those who pay a lot of taxes. This is one of those stereotypes that is so obvious that it can get overlooked.

I would, however, warn that the catchy Dr. Seuss-inspired title--Red State, Blue State--can mislead readers into expecting the book to focus on explaining why some states on the electoral map are red (for Republicans) and others are blue (for Democrats). Ever since the 2000 election, commentators have been puzzling over why so much of the Electoral Vote map (and even more of the county-level map) is painted red for Republicans, even though the Democrats have done fairly well for themselves, winning the popular vote in two of the last three Presidential elections.

For example, here is Mark Newman's 2008 map where a county that 50-50 split between Obama and McCain is set to purple. Even in solidly blue 2008, the map is much more red than blue because Republicans do so well in low-density interior regions.

Instead, Dr. Gelman is most successful at explaining not the differences between states, but the differences within states. Within states, the rich are significantly more likely than the poor to vote Republican. This, he finds, is especially true in "poor" states with lower nominal incomes, which tend to vote Republican. (I put "poor" in quotes because the cost of middle class living, including homeownership rather than renting, varies so much between, say, blue California and red Texas due to differences in land prices that ranking them simply on nominal income can give a doubtful picture of their relative standards of living, as the current foreclosure crisis centered in California suggests.)

In other words, within red states we generally see the kind of old-fashioned relationship between income and voting that, say, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon would instantly recognize: the richer you are, the more Republican you are.

Blue states, in partial contrast, now tend to feature a more diffuse relationship between income and voting (of the kind skewered in Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like). And yet, even in the bluest states, the rich tend to be more Republican, just not as much so as in the poorest states.

Those are very important insights, but they don't necessarily address what the title suggests the book is about: What colors states red or blue?

Consider this graph from the 2007 article "Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: What's the Matter with Connecticut?" in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science.

We see that the rich in impecunious Mississippi are more likely to vote Republican than the rich in affluent Connecticut. Yet, at most above-poverty levels of income, Mississippians are about 10 to 30 percentage points more likely to vote Republican than Nutmeg Staters. Now, that is what strikes me as the real question: what's so different between the two states?

Popular answers to this question generally involve explaining that supporters of the other party are just plain deluded, stupid, or evil, stupid.

To answer the question of why inland areas tend to be redder than coastal areas, I've developed over the last decade a theory that ties a state's voting proclivities to its geography and its geography to its relative level of what I call "affordable family formation."

My approach is largely orthogonal to Dr. Gelman's, so we don't particularly contradict each other.

Dr. Gelman gives a summary of my Affordable Family Formation theory on pp. 170-171 of Red State, Blue State:

One link between economics, voting, and social attitudes has been noticed by journalist Steve Sailer, who hypothesizes that rich, coastal states now favor the Democrats because of increasing house prices, which reduces affordable family formation (marriage and childbearing), in turn limiting the electoral appeal of Republican candidates running on family values. Sailer attributes some of this home price difference to what he calls the Dirt Gap -- coastal and Great Lakes cities such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are bounded by water, which limits their potential for growth, as compared to inland cities such as Dallas or Atlanta: "The supply of suburban land available for development is larger in Red State cities, so the price is lower." The Republicans do better among married voters, who are more likely to end up in more affordable states that also happen to be more culturally conservative.

As a little thought experiment, imagine two sisters who are completely typical except that they are identical twins: with the same nature and nurture. They graduate from college together with degrees in business administration, but then they have to split up for the first time in their lives because one twin gets a job in downtown San Francisco while the other gets a job in downtown Dallas.

Ten years later, when they are 32, which twin is more likely to be a home-owning, married, stay-at-home mom?

Common sense and Census statistics suggest that the twin who got the job in Dallas is likely to take a more conservatively-inclined path through life. Middle class Americans today tend to get married when they are ready to buy a home and have children.

That houses are so much more affordable in the Dallas metropolitan area than in the San Francisco Bay region is one reason why non-Hispanic white women in Texas averaged 15.2 years of marriage between ages 18 and 44 in the 2000 Census, compared to 12.5 years for their counterparts in California.

And why is housing so much cheaper around Dallas than around San Francisco? There are many reasons, but a fundamental one is topographic: San Francisco is surrounded by saltwater and mountains, while Dallas is surrounded by flat dirt. There is simply a greater supply of land around an inland city than around a coastal city, so, ceteris paribus, the former's homes will be cheaper.

Dr. Gelman continues:

The geographic argument -- fewer families in coastal metropolitan areas because there is less room for affordable suburbs -- makes sense, even if it doesn't really explain why the people without children want to vote for Democrats and people with children want to vote for Republicans. It makes sense that more culturally conservative people are voting Republican, and these people are more likely to marry and have children at younger ages, but in that sense the key driving variable is the conservatism, not the family formation. It makes sense that the more culturally conservative people are voting Republican, and these people are more likely to marry and have children at younger ages, but in that sense the key driving variable is the conservatism, not the family formation.

In and endnote, Dr. Gelman supplies my answer: more family-oriented people will tend to move to more family-affordable places, but some others will be influenced by the local culture of wherever they happen to live.

Steve Sailer wrote about his affordable family formation hypothesis in an article, "Value Voters," in The American Conservative on 11 February 2008. He adds, "'family values' voters would thus tend to move to states where they could more easily afford a house with a yard in a satisfactory public school district, painting the Red States redder," and he speculates that "young people of middle-of-the-road tendencies might be more susceptible to starting down the path to conservatism in a state where family formation is quite affordable, such as Texas, than in an expensive state, such as California.
In a related article, "Why do gay men live in San Francisco," from the Journal of Urban Economics in 2002, Dan Black, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor argue that gay men disproportionately move to more attractive cities because they are less likely to have children and thus are more able to afford high housing prices."

Imagine it's now 20 years after college. The 42-year-old twin who got the job in San Francisco now has been married for five years, with a single three-year old daughter. She's working 25 hours per week to help pay the family's $4,000 per month mortgage on their two-bedroom house. Her twin sister in Dallas now has a 14-year-old son, an eleven-year-old daughter, and an eight-year-old son. Her husband's salary can pay their $1,600 per month mortgage on their four-bedroom house, so she stays at home and serves as her youngest son's den mother in the Cub Scouts.

One day, the twins are talking on the phone. One of them happens to mention a Democratic politician's campaign to ban the Boy Scouts of America from holding meetings on public school property because they won't accept gay scoutmasters. The Dallas twin with two sons in Scouting says: "I'm sorry, but it's only common sense that you don't let a gay man take your sons into the woods overnight."

The San Francisco twin with no sons is shocked by her sister's insensitivity, and replies, "But that's discriminating and discrimination can't be allowed."

The twins then get into a big argument that unnerves them both: How have they drifted so far apart in their fundamental values?

Well, life can do that to you. Different parts of the country are conducive to different ways of life, and our social and political attitudes tend to drift along with them.

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MONTANA-BOUND.

post from Ezra Klein on 21 April 2009 06:35:00 PM. © Ezra Klein

Apologies for the light posting today. I'm en route to Missoula, Montana, where I'm going to be giving a talk at The Badlander tomorrow night at 5pm. In the meantime, Dylan Matthews will be taking holding down the blog. He's smart. You like him. You know[...]

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One more angle on the Harman story

post from Daily Kos on 21 April 2009 06:32:03 PM. © Daily Kos

Something else that needs investigating in this Harman story. From the initial CQ Politics coverage:

Justice Department attorneys in the intelligence and public corruption units who read the transcripts decided that Harman had committed a "completed crime," a legal term meaning that there was evidence that she had attempted to complete it, three former officials said.

And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests.

But that's when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened.

According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he "needed Jane" to help support the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.

Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program

He was right.

On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, "I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities."

Pelosi and Hastert never did get the briefing.

And thanks to grateful Bush administration officials, the investigation of Harman was effectively dead.

Putting aside the links to espionage. Putting aside the betrayal of Democratic political hopes by a Blue Dog who was personally compromised.

This is also a story about the hyper-politicization of the Bush "Justice Department" under Alberto Gonzales.

The attorneys in the intelligence and public integrity sections believed they had evidence of a "completed crime." But does Alberto Gonzales take the case where the evidence leads? No!

Instead, he calls off the dogs for a political ally -- if just a temporary ally of convenience -- for the political benefit of the Bush "administration."

Remember, nobody ever really answered for the U.S. Attorneys firing scandal. And even as it was unfolding, Bush "administration" officials denied they were using the DOJ for political ends. And Karl Rove, Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers continue to this day to defy Congressional subpoenas seeking their testimony in the investigations into that politicization.

Now comes even more evidence that they were in fact doing exactly what we all thought they were doing.

How many more Bush "administration" transgressions of the law and subversions of the Constitution will fester and grow steadily worse, with greater and farther-reaching repercussions, as we avert our eyes and hope to scoot away, always "looking forward?"

Where are our answers on the Bush "administration's" perversion of justice? Where is our subpoena power? Are we really going to see Democrats going down for this before the Republicans who actually did it?

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Who's Next on the Corporate CEO Chopping Block

"There's literally billions of reasons to fire Ken Lewis," said SEIU's Stephen Lerner, slamming the[...]

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Apology-worthy

Not sure what hang-time we're looking at here. But is Rep. John Shadegg yet another GOP rep. moth to the Rush flame, with this comment today in an interview with the Arizona Republic ...Shadegg disagrees with radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, who has[...]

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Foxs Mad Tea Party

Fox can try to deny the fact that they aggressively pushed yesterday’s tea parties, but Media Matters has the proof. They found Fox aired 23 separate segments promoting the protests between April 6-13, along with 73 in-show and commercial promotions. Hannity and Neil Cavuto were the biggest offenders, as you can see from [...]

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