—finds nothing, and refuses to throw it back.
And quite a few of its commenters don’t seem to notice that there’s no “there” there, because one thing they do know is that southern Republicans are racist SOBs.
Recommended reading
Madame Roseanne Robespierre…
…says “off with their heads!”
Or maybe it’s the Queen of Hearts Roseanne’s channeling.
Which one you think it is may depend on whether you find Ms. Barr amusing or not. She certainly doesn’t seem to be making a joke here:
Churchill/Christie: the visuals
Gerard Vanderleun of American Digest has offered this teaching aid in response to my piece on criticism of Christie’s girth. I thought it merited a post of its own:
Want to buy an island in the Bronx?
With views, yet?
This guy’s got one to sell you:
The property is to be sold starting at 1 p.m. Sunday by Alex Lyon & Son, which announced the sale with this pitch: “Build your dream home with 360 degree panoramic view of the water or pursue a zone change and create an opportunity for a sound commercial investment.”
Just a few tiny problems, but nothing a little TLC couldn’t fix: it’s a pile of rocks that floods often, and there’s “no water, waste or electrical services or even a dock.”
And then there’s the little matter of the name: Rat Island. No real rats, though; apparently even they won’t live there.
Owner Red Brennan suggests that any interested buyers should consider building a house on stilts. Oh, and his cousin Sam’s got a bridge in Brooklyn…
Was it legal to kill al-Awlaki?
Was it legal to kill al-Awlaki without due process, courtesy of drone?
Some will say “who cares? Good riddance.” But they are ignoring the importance of the issue and the possible danger of the precedent, while those who question the mission’s legality are asking a question that is necessary to confront: under what circumstances can a president order the liquidation of an American citizen (or possible former American citizen) without any courtroom procedure, even a military tribunal?
I have some respect for those on the left who were vocally against Bush’s extra-judicial treatment of terrorists and who also are criticizing Obama for his actions. At least they display an admirable intellectual consistency, although I think they’re wrong.
Here’s why, from Kenneth Anderson at the law blog Volokh. Anderson writes:
The government has maintained throughout all this that Al-Aulaqi was deemed a lawful target not on account of his expression of opinions, including calls to violence against the United States and its citizens, but instead on account of his operational involvement in AQAP, in ways going to leadership of an associated force terrorist organization and operational and planning involvement. My view of this targeted killing is straightforwardly, congratulations, Mr. President. What has been visible publicly leaves little or no doubt in my mind that Al-Aulaqi was deeply involved in AQAP in operations, and indeed at the highest levels…
Who? As an international law matter, is Al-Aulaqi a lawful target? The US government sees him as taking part in hostilities, part of the operational leadership of an associated force with Al Qaeda, the AQAP. So, yes, he can be targeted with lethal force ”” and targeted without warning, without an attempt to arrest or apprehend as a law enforcement matter.
Where? Does it matter that he was in Yemen, and not an “active battlefield” in a conventional hostilities sense? The US government does not accept the idea that the armed conflict with Al Qaeda ”” or armed conflict generally ”” is confined as a legal matter to some notion of “theatres of conflict” or “active battlefields” or related terms that have been used in recent years by academics and activist groups. As I understand the US government position, it sticks by the traditional concept of “hostilities,” and that where the hostiles go, the possibility of armed conflict goes too… So the fact that he was present in Yemen does not make him beyond targeting, because he is not present in some “active” battlezone such as Afghanistan.
There’s more in the essay, much more—and I highly recommend reading the entire thing—as well as this draft of an article by Robert Chesney, written before the killing. It all dovetails considerably with my own thought process on the subject (which I wrote before reading any of the legal discussions), here:
Al Qaeda is a foreign-based international terrorist group that has declared war on the US and put its money where its mouth is. So for al-Awlaki, he’s got a combination of factors that distinguish him: member of foreign terrorist organization that declared war on US, foreign residence for years, and participant in killings.
I will add that it is disturbing and troubling that a US citizen (whether or not he effectively although informally renounced his citizenship some time before that) was summarily killed by a drone. But the arguments are strong that in this sort of case it is legally acceptable to have done so, and the practical arguments also make it clear that there was no other way to prevent further attacks on this country by this person. In his draft, Chesney writes on the latter subject (again, his piece was written before the killing):
(i) there is substantial evidence that [al-Alwaki] is planning terrorist attacks, (ii) there is no plausible opportunity to incapacitate him with non-lethal means, and (iii) there is not good reason to believe that a plausible non-lethal opportunity to incapacitate him will arise before harm to others occurs. A second question then arises, however. Must al-Awlaki be linked to a specific plot to carry out a particular attack, or is it enough that the evidence establishes that he can and will attempt or otherwise be involved in attacks in the future without specificity as to what the particulars of those attacks might be? The former approach has the virtue of clarity, yet could rarely be satisfied given the clandestine nature of terrorism. The latter approach necessarily runs a greater risk of abuse and thus perhaps justifies an especially high evidentiary threshold, but in any event it is a more realistic and more appropriate approach (particularly from the point of view of the potential victims of future terrorist attacks).
Fighting international terrorism presents us with a different kind of war. That does not mean we can do whatever we want. But it does mean that the rules need developing and clarifying. I’ll finish with Anderson again:
As to the due process claims, as Robert Chesney notes at Lawfare, the US government does not appear to be taking a blanket position that a US citizen deemed to be a targetable participant in a terrorist group has no due process rights outside of the US in any sense, on the one hand, but neither does it appear to take the position that the vindication of whatever those due process rights are entitles the citizen to merely being subject to an attempt to arrest, including in a remote location in Yemen, and to warning before using lethal force. I don’t think the US government has a worked out position suitable for every case ”” as seems to me quite appropriate. It is in the process of working out something that is only partly like straight-up armed conflict law and something that is gradually, inchoately emerging as a sort of “state practice” of covert intelligence operations. The working out of those positions is proceeding case by case.
Buffett opines on the Buffett rule
Buffett isn’t so sure he likes the Buffett rule, although he’s still sure he likes Obama. Nor is he all that certain that he knows how Obama plans to define it.
This is the Buffett rule as Buffett now says he would like to see it:
[Buffett] noted he was describing a very limited number of wealthy Americans who earn the majority of their income through capital gains, which is taxed at a 15 percent rate.
“What I’m talking about would not apply to someone that made $5 million a year as a baseball player or $10 million a year on media,” Buffett said on Fox Business Network. “It would apply only to probably 50,000 people out of 309 million who have huge incomes, pay very low taxes. There should be a policy that applies to people with money who earn lots of money and pay very low rates. If they earn it by normal jobs what I say would not hit them at all.”
Going back to Buffett’s NY Times op-ed that started all the commotion, I think he’s rewriting history about the scope of his suggestions. After all, his piece ended with these thoughts, which appear to apply not just to capital gains but to regular income as well:
But for those making more than $1 million ”” there were 236,883 such households in 2009 ”” I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more ”” there were 8,274 in 2009 ”” I would suggest an additional increase in rate.
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
[NOTE: I wrote about Buffett’s original Times article here.]
A rare confluence: Jonathan Chait and I…
…agree about fat guy Chris Christie, and those who criticize him for being endowed with excess adipose.
In Chait’s article he refers the reader to this book, The Obesity Myth. I haven’t read it, but I’m familiar with the genre. Most of the studies I’ve read about obesity have convinced me that we know a lot less than we think we know about it, that being fat is not necessarily as bad for one’s health as is commonly supposed, that losing weight is really hard for the majority of fat people (and not because they’re lazy or lack discipline, either), and that weight loss does not necessarily confer the desired health benefits.
What’s more, as a 49-year-old man (he would be 50 in 2012), even if Christie runs a risk of dying that is many times the average for his age, his absolute risk would still be very low. Plus, a slightly increased statistical risk is only important in terms of large numbers of people. It has virtually no predictive value for the health of a single individual. When evaluating candidates, we can only pay attention to their actual health.
I well remember that in 2000, when Cheney was elected VP, I thought for sure he’d never survive four years let alone eight, and certainly not if the years were especially stressful. And yet I was completely wrong about that. And I was not evaluating him on actuarial risk, but his own terrible health history which gave him a pretty poor prognosis. But he defied the prognosis.
Churchill, as many have pointed out, had a number of supposed risk factors but lived to be 90, and was PM for the last time at the age of 80. I think this tut-tutting at the fat is one of the vestiges of Puritanism in our society, which has always had that tendency. Sir Winston would not approve:
[ADDENDUM: It’s not just Chait—Ezra Klein and I agree on the topic, too. Will wonders never cease? And I’m even going to quote Klein approvingly:
Ken Thorpe, a professor at the Rollins School of Publish Health at Emory University, was similarly unimpressed. “Excess weight probably shaves between zero years and a year-and-a-half from life expectancy,” he says. Compare that to smoking, which rips 13 to 14 years off a person’s life expectancy. “The problem with obesity is morbidity, not mortality. You have a higher rate of diabetes, bad cholesterol, back pain, that kind of thing. But if you’re taking your blood sugar medications and the right statins and so on, you can control a lot of that.”
So without more information, there’s no real reason to think that Christie isn’t up to the job of being president, or that he’s at a particularly high risk of keeling over should he take office.
Which reminds me: does Obama still smoke? If so, is he not then at higher risk than Christie (depending on whether Professor Thorpe’s figures are correct; some research indicates the risks from smoking and obesity are about equal)? But even if he is still a smoker, my arguments hold up for Obama as well as for Christie: his absolute risk would remain small, as long as his general health appears good, which it does.
Now it’s time to have a doughnut. I wish.]
[ADDENDUM II: Looking back, I see I wrote something similar about McCain’s candidacy, when he was criticized for being too old to run.]
I suppose…
…this reality show was inevitable.
See this for an earlier discussion of related issues (boy, is that a pun!—and a double pun at that).
[Hat tip: Althouse.]
Unhappy anniversary: Munich
It’s been 73 years to the day that the Munich Pact was signed (on September 30, although it was post-dated September 29), ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler and giving appeasement a bad name.
No, I don’t have the date memorized; I noticed it because of the subject matter of the top four articles at RealClearHistory. They are well worth reading as an object lesson not just in the perils of giving in to tyrants, but on just how gullible many people are about the nature of evil.
I learned some details I hadn’t known before. For example, in March of 1939, a few months after Munich, when Hitler had caused the Czech government to cease to exist and invaded the country, here’s how Chamberlain finally reacted:
Chamberlain responded to Hitler’s aggression by claiming the British were not bound to protect Czechoslovakia since the country in effect no longer existed after Slovakia had voted for independence on March 14th. And Hitler’s actions had occurred the next day, March 15th.
The Prime Minister’s willy-nilly statement caused an uproar in the British press and in the House of Commons…
Interestingly, while traveling on a train from London to Birmingham on Friday, March 17, Chamberlain underwent a complete change of heart. He had in his hand a prepared speech discussing routine domestic matters that he was supposed to give in Birmingham. But upon deep reflection, he decided to junk the speech and outlined a brand new one concerning Hitler…
“The Fé¼hrer,” Chamberlain asserted, “has taken the law into his own hands.”…
“Is this the last attack upon a small state or is it to be followed by others? Is this, in effect, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?”
If so, Chamberlain declared: “No greater mistake could be made than to suppose that because it believes war to be a senseless and cruel thing, this nation has so lost its fiber that it will not take part to the utmost of its power in resisting such a challenge if it ever were made.”
Chamberlain finally had gotten the nature of the man he’d been negotiating with, supposedly in good faith. Too little, too late; but better late than never. And soon Chamberlain would be replaced by the man who had understood the nature of the enemy all along: Churchill.
[NOTE: Here’s an attempt to defend Chamberlain—a little bit, anyway.]
Right on schedule…
…here come the “Christie’s too fat to be president” articles (here and here).
From the latter:
Unfortunately, the symbolism of Christie’s weight problem goes way past the issue of obesity itself. It is just a too-perfect symbol of our country at the moment, with appetites out of control and discipline near zilch.
There’s just a wee bit of trouble with that metaphor—actually, it’s Christie who’s trying to rein in the appetites of the public sector and unions in New Jersey, and to install fiscal discipline.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar had a different way to look at it:
CAESAR
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.ANTONY
Fear him not, Caesar; he’s not dangerous;
He is a noble Roman and well given.CAESAR
Would he were fatter! But I fear him not:
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much;
He is a great observer and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock’d himself and scorn’d his spirit
That could be moved to smile at any thing.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.
Another al Qaeda terrorist…
…killed.
And by the same unit that got Bin Laden.
This time it was the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. He apparently was the power behind the Christmas bomber (otherwise known as the underwear bomber), and “inspired” the 2010 Times Square bombing and the murders committed by army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, as well “having a hand” in various and sundry mail bombs.
It is surprising that the left ordinarily seems less perturbed by the killing of terrorists without a trial than by the far less dreadful things that used to happen to a very small number of them while in US custody. But apparently some groups are more consistent in their criticisms, even though it’s no longer the nefarious Bushitler who’s in charge:
Al-Awlaki is a U.S. citizen, born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, who had not been charged with any crime. Civil liberties groups have questioned the government’s authority to kill an American without trial.
Oh, and they almost got al-Awlaki on the tenth anniversary of 9/11.