Messenger Photo of Mercury
As reported in Sky & Tel, Messenger made a flyby of Mercury on Monday. Here’s an amazing photo from 27,000 km out. (The flyby got to within 200 km.)
Candidates’ Issues Pages
Thanks to Mahablog:
If you want details, don’t wait for details to be spoon fed to you through mass media. The candidates’ websites have the details. All you have to do is click and read.
[W]hen you get beneath the interface, some of McCain’s content is a bit dated. His “Relief for American Families” section still promotes a summer gas tax holiday, for example. And much of the content is vague. You read that John McCain is going to act decisively to achieve this or that goal, but often the “how” is missing.
On Obama’s site you get how up the wazoo.
- He has bulleted lists.
- He has lots of bulleted lists.
- His bulleted lists have bulleted lists.
Dear Wall St., do us all a huge favor: Jump!
Yeah, this seems about right:
Interrupting the negotiations to save his campaign
Origins of the Financial Crisis Explained
The best explanation I’ve seen:
Joe goes to the track and bets $2 on a horse.
Two guys standing nearby get into a discussion and Fred says to Sam, “I’ll bet you $5 that Joe wins his bet.”
Next to them are Bill and Bob. Bill says: “I’ll bet you $10 that Fred welshes on his bet if he loses.”
Next to them is Sally. Sally says: “For $3 I’ll guarantee to Bill that if Bob fails to pay off, I’ll make good on the bet.”
Sally then goes to Mary and borrows the $7 needed in case she has to ever pay off and promises to pay back $8. She doesn’t expect to every have to pay since she believes Bob will always make good. So she expects to net $2 no matter what happens to Joe.
A quick calculation indicates that there is now 2+5+10+3+7 = $27 riding on the outcome of the horse race.
Question how much has been “invested” in the horse race?
Wait for it:
Answer:
$50,000 by the owner of the horse who is expecting to recoup his investment from the winnings of the horse and other future deals. Everyone else is gambling, not investing
Dems vs. Thugs on Job Creation
from Dwight Meredith, we have the ranking of the last 13 occupants of the Oval Office by job creation (only through 2002, so the number for the Pissant is inaccurate and more likely in the neighborhood of +0.5%). Keep in mind that a job creation rate that does not keep pace with the rate of population increase is in fact a negative job growth. For reference, the U.S. population growth rate averaged 1.3 percent per year during the 20th century.
1) Roosevelt (1933-45): +5.3%
2) Johnson (1963-69): +3.8%
3) Carter (1977-81): +3.1%
4) Truman: (1945-53): +2.5%
5) Kennedy (1961-63): +2.5%
6) Clinton (1993-2001): +2.4%
7) Nixon (1969-75): +2.2%
8) Reagan (1981-89): +2.1%
9) Ford (1975-77): +1.1%
10) Eisenhower (1953-61): +0.9%
11) Bush (1989-93): +0.6%
12) Bush (2001-present): -0.7%
13) Hoover (1929-33): -9.0%
McLiar/Palin Contempt for Rule of Law (and Democracy)
Glenn Greenwald writes:
[W]ith the heavy involvement of the McCain campaign, Gov. Palin has embraced core GOP “principles”—political officials can unilaterally exempt themselves from the rule of law and the people, through their elected representatives in the legislature, are powerless to learn what their political leaders have done. That, of course, has been the guiding principle of the Bush administration—as one Bush official after the next has simply refused to comply with Congressional subpoenas as part of investigations into serious allegations of lawbreaking and other wrongdoing—and the McCain campaign and the Palins are leaving no doubt that they are full-fledged believers in these corrupt and lawless prerogatives.
This sort of lawless arrogance doesn’t merely insulate political officials from any accountability, though it does do that. It also destroys the crux of representative democracy.
More Fallout from Pissant Bush Misadministration
From Adam Liptak in the NTY:
Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.
But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.
"One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.”
From 1990 through 2002, for instance, the Canadian Supreme Court cited decisions of the United States Supreme Court about a dozen times a year, an analysis by The New York Times found. In the six years since, the annual citation rate has fallen by half, to about six.
Australian state supreme courts cited American decisions 208 times in 1995, according to a recent study by Russell Smyth, an Australian economist. By 2005, the number had fallen to 72.
The story is similar around the globe, legal experts say, particularly in cases involving human rights. These days, foreign courts in developed democracies often cite the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in cases concerning equality, liberty and prohibitions against cruel treatment, said Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of the Yale Law School. In those areas, Dean Koh said, “they tend not to look to the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The rise of new and sophisticated constitutional courts elsewhere is one reason for the Supreme Court’s fading influence, legal experts said. The new courts are, moreover, generally more liberal tha[n] the Rehnquist and Roberts courts and for that reason more inclined to cite one another.
Another reason is the diminished reputation of the United States in some parts of the world, which experts here and abroad said is in part a consequence of the Bush administration’s unpopularity around the world. Foreign courts are less apt to justify their decisions with citations to cases from a nation unpopular with their domestic audience.
[...]
Partly as a consequence, Chief Justice Barak wrote, the United States Supreme Court “is losing the central role it once had among courts in modern democracies.”
Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia said ... ”America is in danger of becoming something of a legal backwater.”
[...]
The trend abroad, moreover, is toward decisions of a distinctly liberal sort in areas like the death penalty and gay rights. “What we have had in the last 20 or 30 years,” Professor Fried said, “is an enormous coup d’état on the part of judiciaries everywhere - the European Court of Human Rights, Canada, South Africa, Israel.” In terms of judicial activism, he said, “they’ve lapped us.”
The rightward shift of the Supreme Court may partly account for its diminished influence. Twenty years ago, said Anthony Lester, a British barrister, the landmark decisions of the court were “studied with as much attention in New Delhi or Strasbourg as they are in Washington, D.C.”
[...]
Many legal scholars singled out the Canadian Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court of South Africa as increasingly influential.
"In part, their influence may spring from the simple fact they are not American,” Dean Slaughter wrote in a 2005 essay, “which renders their reasoning more politically palatable to domestic audience in an era of extraordinary U.S. military, political, economic and cultural power [i.e., abuse] and accompanying resentments.”
Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia, wrote in a 2000 essay that the Canadian Supreme Court had been particularly influential because “Canada, unlike the United States, is seen as reflecting an emerging international consensus rather than existing as an outlier.”
[...]
American precedents were cited about half as often as Canadian ones. “It is surprising,” the authors wrote, “that American cases are not cited more often, since the United States Bill of Rights precedents can be found on just about any rights issue that comes up.”
American popular attitudes toward the citation of foreign law, by contrast, Mark C. Rahdert wrote in the American University Law Review last year, “tap into a longstanding tradition of exceptionalism.”
That tradition is rooted in a popular devotion to the Constitution unknown in the rest of the world. It is supported by aspects of the American character that were formed by the nation’s initial geographic isolation and pioneer spirit, which emphasized freedom, private property and individual responsibility. That has led, for instance, to a near-absolute commitment to free speech and a particularly tough approach to crime.
In “ ‘A Shining City on a Hill’: American Exceptionalism and the Supreme Court’s Practice of Relying on Foreign Law,” a 2006 article in the Boston University Law Review, Professor Calabresi concluded that the Supreme Court should be wary of citing foreign law in most constitutional cases precisely because the United States is exceptional.
"Like it or not,” he wrote, “Americans really are a special people with a special ideology that sets us apart from all the other peoples.”
Yeah, we ARE serious: seriously stoopid, that is
A Brit (and therefore, unlike half of America, a person with a functioning brain) chimes in:
But seriously: a black man talking seriously or a moose-killer forbidden to attempt coherent speech? And your choice is?
Too close to call. America, that is almost beyond words. I have neither a personal nor a partisan interest. Ms Palin and Mr Obama alike are foreign to me. Yet if Mr Bush has been a dangerous absurdity, what is the latest Republican president-but-one? Since I’m asking the questions, I’ll answer.
Ms Palin is a symbol of deep American introversion, of the fact that you have ceased to take yourselves seriously and, more important, don’t much care who knows it. Arguments over the relationship between the wider world and your choices have become irrelevant. You have detached yourself, finally, from the global community. This is isolationism as never before conceived. “American” in my life has been lingua franca, for better or ill. Now you talk to yourself.
And you talk, my friends, in the sort of gibberish that once you spurned. It’s not about Ms Palin, as such. It is about the process that creates a candidate-grin manipulated to serve darkness, ignorance, fear, a war economy, and the flaunting of stupidity.
Nice going.
Unstable + Unable
Or should that be “Incontinent/Incompetent”? From Alaska’s largest protest rally ever:
McCain Campaign Lies
Paul Krugman in the NYT:
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere? These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.