Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Declan McCullagh reported on the efforts to give law enforcement agencies direct access to ISP traffic. At the end of the article the Cato Institute throws in the towel and admits it doesn’t give a damn about individual liberty. I try to link to right-leaning civil libertarians on my blogroll (Cato was until this morning), but they seem susceptible to putting political considerations above principles. Stuff like this makes them look like frauds.

Cato is off my blogroll, but Marcy and Glenn showed why they’re pretty well cemented onto it at the moment.

A nice note of caution from Steve Benen, but I’d just like to point out Jonathan Alter is not a liberal. He blows with the capitol winds.

You know, Barack Obama has taken steps to close Guantánamo, real ones not symbolic. Here is another one. The fact that Congressional Democrats have still not found a way to stand up to the lily livered, pabulum puking, namby pamby, pants wetting conniptions on the right hasn’t made this task any easier. You’d think it would be pretty easy to defeat the GOP’s dedicated commitment to weakness. You’d be wrong.

Eric Holder cited the previous administration to push back on Republican fearmongering. Reflect on the following: Conservatives have succeeded in making George Bush look enlightened on civil rights. The beast is loosed.

I try to avoid long excerpts, but this (via) from Corey Pein of the Santa Fe Reporter is hard to do justice to in brief. It’s a long article on Samuel Bowles, the head of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute and an economist whose theories ought to turn the conventional wisdom on its head.

Zero describes the ultimate level playing field, a nonexistent land in which everyone has all the same stuff. A completely unequal society, in which one person has sole control of literally everything, would have a Gini of 100. New Mexico’s Gini score (45.7) reveals this state is more unequal than most. Utah is the most egalitarian state (with a 41.3 Gini), while the District of Columbia (53.7) is the most economically polarized, according to the most recent Census report, from 2006.

The second figure, 23, is the Gini for Sweden, the world’s most egalitarian country. Whereas most of Europe, Canada and Australia have Ginis in the low 30s, the US has over the past several decades developed inequalities usually found only in poor countries with autocratic governments.

So what? Isn’t inequality merely the price of America being No. 1?

“That’s almost certainly false,” Bowles tells SFR. “Prior to about 20 years ago, most economists thought that inequality just greased the wheels of progress. Overwhelmingly now, people who study it empirically think that it’s sand in the wheels.”

[snip]

Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.

The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.

The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. - Mark Twain

James Wolcott had a sublime take on the neocons: “Feeding fiery coals and nameless corpses into their gaping jaws is an endless, inexhaustible task.”

Two longer pieces from later in the week that I’ll be getting to shortly. Jane Mayer on the KSM trial, and Marcy has a first take on it. Then Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story look at Goldman’s relationship with AIG, and Yves Smith and Tom Adams point to the missing actors: the Fed and the Treasury.

How obstruction works: “When there’s a 94-2 vote, it tells us that this was a fine nominee, who shouldn’t have had to wait nine months for an up-or-down vote.”

Pete Hoekstra: Still crazy. If he wins this November he will be the Detroit Lions of governors.

Spencer Ackerman has some details on why cutting military spending is necessary, and why it will be so hard.

Privacy and Security are Complimentary. This is the kind of thing civil libertarians could really make hay with. And liberals could really get some traction with this (via): “If we want more globalization, we must either give up some democracy or some national sovereignty. Pretending that we can have all three simultaneously leaves us in an unstable no-man’s land.”

Finally, LarryE pushes back on Greenwald (emph. in orig.):

We can and we damn well should find that corporations do not have rights of free speech even as we may well want to (and should) say they have rights of due process. If the concern is about the effect of limitations on advocacy groups, we can treat non-profits differently from for-profits (including saying that for-profits can’t set up non-profits to evade the restrictions). The point is, we can choose.

To suggest otherwise, to suggest corporations, by definition, either must have all the Constitutional rights of people or they can have no rights at all, that our only choice is between allowing huge corporations to spend untold amounts of cash in support of political candidates and having the ACLU, labor unions, and the Ma-and-Pa store down the street be at constant risk of being crushed under the heel of jack-booted FBI agents, Is. Utter. Pathetic. Nonsense.

I forgot to link to this last week. Your Sunday funny.

I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Matt Yglesias: “I congratulate Shelby on fully exploring the logic of the modern United States Senate.”