Pruning Shears

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

Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.

I don’t want the military to be above criticism, so I don’t have a problem with this. It is worth noting, though, that a similarly sharp criticism from the left prompted Congressional censure. I didn’t think it should have been done then and don’t think it should be done now - but let’s pause a moment to mark the cynicism and hypocrisy of the right, along with the Republican-friendly DC media’s unwillingness to whip up a similar frenzy.

Daniel Larison is one of the few conservatives I genuinely admire, because he writes things like this:

the reason our debates are so poisonous and our nation so divided might have something to do with the existence of utterly unaccountable members of the political class that can launch such a war, suffer no real consequences, and then reliably expect to be defended as “decent” and “well-intentioned” people who made understandable mistakes. The unfortunate truth of our existence is that villains do not have to come out of central casting for comic book movies. They are ordinary, “decent” people who commit grave errors and terrible crimes for any number of reasons. Many great evils have found their origins in a group’s belief that they were doing the right thing and were therefore entitled and permitted to use extraordinary means.

This is what qualifies on the right as blowing up a socialist fiction:

Natoma Canfield, the cancer-stricken woman who has become a centerpiece of President Obama’s push for health care reform, will not lose her home over her medical bills and will probably qualify for financial aid, a top official at the Cleveland medical center treating her told FoxNews.com.

He’s a C overall, but on transparency he’s in the D- range.

Leftover link from Thursday. A longish report, but fascinating.

Brazil is breaking US patents on a host of items. It’s part of a trade dispute, not an intellectual property one, so I’m sure it will get ironed out soon enough. But patent and copyright laws are radically and unproductively skewed towards the holders. Things should go into the public domain after fifteen years, max. You’d think conservatives would champion something like this since it would be a tax- and regulation-free way to unleash creative forces in the market. By forcing companies to stop squatting on aging franchises in an effort to squeeze every last nickel out of them, we could free them up to pursue new creative endeavors and give the masses a shot at doing something profitable with them.

Before you cry for Mickey Mouse, keep in mind that if a forceful IP lobby had been around in the time of Grimm’s fairy tales we wouldn’t have some of Disney’s most popular films. Open it up, and sooner rather than later. Lots of good, upstanding, imaginative people will produce wonderful original content by it. Any such effort will face long odds, though. There are lots of highly placed defenders of the IP status quo.

Alt-A and Option ARM defaults (via) can’t be blamed on the Community Reinvestment Act. Someone needs to get on the stick and figure out an angle that blames minorities.

Looks like we’ll have a vote on health care. Athenae had my favorite take, with this: “we’ve already established that the bill is far less than what we need but better than nothing so fucking get it done already so we can start talking about fixing it to become what we need[.]” She then topped it with this, explaining why even the wildest dream of progressive idealists - single payer - would still be a damn sight short of enough:

Even if you have insurance, and even if you can keep your insurance when you need your insurance, and even if there’s a hospital within driving distance and even if your car works that day and even if you can get an appointment with a gynecologist to practice their love and even if that appointment doesn’t cost anything, you’re still mightily screwed if you can’t take the day off work or if you get paid by the hour and can’t afford rent if you take off the hours.

Jack Goldsmith has always been an interesting character to me. As head of Bush’s OLC he withdrew the Yoo/Bybee torture memos, and that had to have been in the face of some pretty intense pressure. On the other hand, he’s also emphatically in the civil liberties-hostile wing of the conservative movement, as efforts like this indicate. That people like this and John Ashcroft ended up being profiles in courage and Constitutional champions in the Bush White House shows just how far we slid into authoritarianism. We are dealing with the fallout now, and it isn’t pretty. We’ve got a long ways to go to get back to where we were.

I have nothing to support this, but for a while now I’ve suspected the Soviet Union helped strengthen America’s commitment to the rule of law. Having them out there made it important for us to distinguish ourselves, to say to the rest of the world “see? We’re better than that!” We leaned against them in a moral sense, and when they crumbled we fell down. I don’t think we’re worse now than we were during the Cold War even though we are doing things now that would have been unthinkable then. The reason is, we have to now figure out why not to do this stuff on the merits, not just as a piece of a global propaganda campaign.

More from Marcy. She was busy this week.

“If you have a society where it becomes foolish not to steal, then only fools don’t steal.” Oh, and you know why civil liberties extremists are always jumping up and down about secrecy and redactions in the War On Terror? There are many reasons to oppose it, including the sufficient one that it’s improper for government to hide its activities from its citizens. But it also leads to expanded secrecy, and ends up getting used in situations that plainly are not related to national security.

Matthew Yglesias is definitely one of the smartest guys in the room.

Terrible idea of the week:

“The Federal Reserve believes it is possible that, ultimately, its operating framework will allow the elimination of minimum reserve requirements, which impose costs and distortions on the banking system,” footnote number nine, at the bottom of the page, explains without additional qualification.

I spent some time in a conservative comment thread, if you’re interested. I’m always hearing from DC Moderates how us fringy types only consume news sources that we agree with, so here’s a bit of evidence to the contrary. That I feel the need to bat down arguments of people I don’t think well of speaks poorly of me, I know.

Saddest news of the week. Say it ain’t so!

I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Spencer Ackerman, on how to make media outlets think twice before giving the Cheney gang a platform:

You’d have to make Fred Hiatt have to constantly answer for hiring Marc Thiessen and you’d have to put the Washington bureaus of the TV networks in a position where their self-regard as professionals is, publicly, at issue. And you’d have to do it in a way that avoids those malefactors preening that their uncritical embrace of intellectual dishonesty is a sign of integrity - after all, aren’t they brave to give a voice to the other side in the debate that the braying left wants to shut down, etc. The Cheneys only matter as much as the media allow them to matter.