Haydar Khalil, a Praham market trader spits a cherry pip out of his mouth as he takes part in a cherry pip spitting competition at the launch of the 2009 Victorian Cherry Season at Prahran Market on November 20, 2009 in Melbourne, Australia. The competition was won by Khalil who spat his cherry pip 15.97 metres. By Scott Barbour/Getty.

Both 2000 and 2004 were close enough to justify some amount of paranoia. Now, perhaps, the Republicans are paying back the Democratic conspiracy mongering of the last decade with their own childishness. ACORN is the GOP’s Diebold, maybe. “Barack Obama is illegitimate,” is the Republicans’ version of “George W. Bush is going to suspend elections in 2008 and seize power as a dictator.” The difference, though, would seem to be how widespread this stuff is. I haven’t seen good polling on how many Democrats bought into the crazier theories during the Bush years, but it couldn’t possibly have been this widespread. Could it have?

If I'm Charlie Crist, I realize that I'm toast in the Republican primary. I note that a three-way race is a coin flip at best. But as a Democrat... switching parties and making an earnest transition on the issues would be the cleanest path to a Senate seat. It's clear that he's no longer welcome in his own party. And he has a choice to make -- remain as a hated interloper in his existing party, or try to find a more hospitable home elsewhere.

It's hard to see how today's religious and angry Republican base can tolerate people like Snowe or Colins or Specter or Crist or Huntsman for much longer.

A debt-ridden economy is inherently more fragile and more volatile. This doesn’t mean that the tax system caused the financial crisis; after all, the tax breaks have been around for a long time, and the crisis is new. But, as a recent I.M.F. study found, tax distortions likely made the total amount of debt that people and companies took on much bigger. And that made the bursting of the housing bubble especially damaging. So encouraging people to take on debt qualifies as a genuinely bad idea.

[...]

The clearest hurdle to these changes may be political, but the bigger hurdle is, in a way, psychological: because tax breaks on debt have been around so long, we can hardly imagine what it would be like if we changed them, and we tend to underestimate their influence in shaping our behavior. Subsidizing debt seems harmless simply because we’ve always done it. But the fact that you’ve had a bad habit for a long time doesn’t make it less dangerous. 

In an idealized view, our judicial system is insulated from the ribald passions of politics. In reality, those passions suffuse the criminal justice system, and no matter how compelling the case for suppressing evidence that would actually effect the trial might be, given the politics at play, there is no judge in the country who will seriously endanger the prosecution. Instead, with the defense motions duly denied, the case will proceed to trial, and then (as no jury in the country is going to acquit KSM) to conviction and a series of appeals. And that's where the ultimate effect of a vigorous defense of KSM gets really grim.

At each stage of the appellate process, a higher court will countenance the cowardly decisions made by the trial judge, ennobling them with the unfortunate force of precedent. The judicial refusal to consider KSM's years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM's initial torture from his subsequent "clean team" statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they've been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.

In the end, KSM will be convicted and America will declare the case a great victory for process, openness, and ordinary criminal procedure. Bringing KSM to trial in New York will still be far better than any of the available alternatives. But the toll his torture and imprisonment has already taken, and the price the bad law his defense will create will exact, will become part of the folly of our post-9/11 madness.

A reader writes:

This is a video of an ex-MMA fighter from Japan who is now apparently some sort of dance/singing star. I think it fits with what you normally put up.

The day Palin's book came out I wrote the original review on Amazon that you quoted from buzzfeed ("So what if Sarah Palin didn't write this book? Even God used early scribes to write the Bible,"), although someone named "Moe Hong" later came along and quoted me. The scary thing is, I don't know if Moe was being facetious.  I was, but now feel guilty about it.

I rated Going Rogue five-stars because I wanted my satire to be complete.  Admittedly, my intent was to be ranked the most helpful review so that customers would read it, click my profile and go to MY books (my memoir details growing up and coming out of and leaving fundamentalism) but after reading your blog this week about why you take her seriously, I have had second thoughts about treating her and this book so lightly.  Just because I can't possibly take her seriously, nor see any way anyone else could take her seriously, doesn't mean she's not a serious danger to my country. 

To my mind, either you believe same-sex-marriage is a basic human right, or you don't.  Either you believe abortion is profoundly immoral or you don't.  I fail to see why so many are focused on whether it's a state or the country that allows or forbids either issue.  We all vote in local, state and federal elections, so is it simply because one's vote in a state election counts for more than one's vote in a federal election?  And, if this is really your preference, why aren't conservatives lobbying for cities' and counties' rights as well?  Similarly, given the vast differences in state populations, the whole "let the individual states decide" argument inherently accepts that the vote of a pro-life Californian is worth less than that of a pro-life voter in Montana.  Why do you prefer such an inequitable system?   Yes, states are clearly defined political entities and, as such, are easy to talk about, but so are nations.   And, in federal elections, the vote of any one American is worth the same as that of any other American. 

 

As to the whole "laboratories" concept, I certainly understand how that makes sense with respect to things like "small d" democracy issues.   Allowing the individual states to test 50 different ways of registering voters makes sense - eventually, a "better" or even a "best" way of registering voters should rise to the top.  However, when it comes to questions to which one can only respond yes/no, true/false or right/wrong, that same "good, better, best" scale isn't really appropriate.   Incubation in the states simply results in an incoherent patchwork of opposing rules - and not a distillation of 50 different ways to accomplish a goal.  Either gays can get married or they can't.  Either women can have abortions or they can't.  Yes, there are gray areas like civil unions, but for the most part, these are binary issues where repeated experimentation will not produce an outcome other than 0 or 1.  

 

I think it's wrong to prevent any gay couple from getting married.  I also think it's wrong to prevent any woman from making her own reproductive decisions.  Obviously, many disagree with me and neither side will rest until our side is universally victorious.  So, I ask again, why are you so convinced that debating these issues in 50 state capitals is so much better than doing so in one?