Month: September 2009

Asked and Answered

David Broder: If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?
Lemkin: Yes.
David Broder: The wheels are turning, but they can still be halted before irreparable damage is done.
Lemkin: My, it’s amazing you think the damage has yet to be done. Why are you employed by a major media corporation, and upon which planet do you spend most of your time?
David Broder: …

True Patriotism

Back in July, John Kyl wished all stimulus spending would come to an end. Eric Cantor has come out today in the same vein. Why would they say such a thing?

I’d wager it’s because of the undercurrents of recovery that lead to this Wall Street Journal Headline:

U.S. Economy Gets Lift From Stimulus

You see, the real issue is that (from the GOP’s point of view) the stimulus must be seen to fail. And miserably. For the stimulus to be regarded as an unqualified (or even a marginal) success is to destroy everything the GOP has been working for. In fact, for it to be successful even in light of being rather randomly pared down to meet arbitrary “centrist” specifications would be an unmitigated disaster for the GOP heading as it is into the 2010 election cycle. Because, you see, they realize that only a fraction of the stimulus has yet become active. Indeed, witness this paragraph from the above linked WSJ:

Much of the stimulus spending is just beginning to trickle through the economy, with spending expected to peak sometime later this year or in early 2010. The government has funneled about $60 billion of the $288 billion in promised tax cuts to U.S. households, while about $84 billion of the $499 billion in spending has been paid. About $200 billion has been promised to certain projects, such as infrastructure and energy projects.

[…]

For the third quarter, economists at Goldman Sachs & Co. predict the U.S. economy will grow by 3.3%. “Without that extra stimulus, we would be somewhere around zero,” said Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist for Goldman.

Thus the logic for the GOP is rather simple. The stimulus is working; the stimulus Must Be Stopped. It’s the only patriotic position possible. The GOP needs that growth to be “somewhere around zero” for their 2010 campaign ads, after all.

Yglesias is Right

Matt Yglesias again comes down on the right side of the argument. The nut of his take:

there is one crucially important difference [between Democrats and Republicans when holding the majority power]. Democrats hand out committee chairmanships by a blind seniority rule. Republicans do not. Chairman need to rotate out of their positions after fixed terms, which then gives the caucus as a whole input over who takes over next. Consequently, the Senate leadership has some meaningful leverage over Republican Senators—even Senators from liberal states. If they’re really determined to make Snowe (and Collins) vote “no,” they have tools at their disposal to make that happen. By contrast, the Democratic leadership heads into tough fights basically disarmed with no real tools of discipline and leverage at their disposal

Yep. True discipline will only occur when some of these senior Senators face losing their beloved power-levers. You vote “No” on cloture over a keynote issue like healthcare, you should lose all seniority. Period. Furthermore, the Democrats could make serious hay by simply offering moderate Republicans like Snowe and Collins certain perks they’d never, ever get by simply party-lining it along with the rest of the GOP. Better committee, Chair of something, bigger office, whatever the hell it takes to procedurally sweeten the pot: do it. That’s how to begin, begin rebuilding anything resembling the much sought after bipartisanship that high-Broderism so values.

Let’s review: healthcare reform is and always has been a debate between liberal and conservative Democrats. To the extent that any GOP votes can be found in the Senate, those individuals should be rewarded by receiving treatment that any conservative Democrat with equal seniority might enjoy. But you can basically forget the GOP as honest negotiators or compromise partners in this debate. Not going to happen. Thus: absolute requirement that every Democrat vote for cloture. Or else.

Dr. Sean Maguire Alert

The Wall Street Journal uncritically (and unsurprisingly) runs this rather idiotic op-ed from former CIA official Herbert Meyer:

By authorizing Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to determine whether a full criminal investigation of CIA employees and contractors is warranted for the manner in which they interrogated captured terrorists, the President has thrown his power and support behind those far-left ideologues

Indeed, Obama has, by instructing his Justice Department to enforce the law, thrown his power behind those dreaded far-left ideologues. Remember when the GOP was the “law and order” party? Now they’re the Two Society Party: one, for our Leadership Caste, is utterly without law, restraint, or control. Do whatever you want. The other, for everyone else: unremitting and inflexible enforcement of the fullest possible extent of the law for even the most minor infractions. In America, you see, it’s critically important to be born well. Anybody else: go fuck yourself.

At any rate, these interrogators, even if and when they did break the laws, were only doing so with the best of intentions:

[they’d rather suffer torture than] be thought of as anything other than honorable patriots doing their best, under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, to protect our country from its enemies

I see. That is a compelling and well-reasoned defense. So torturing KSM some 180 times inside of a month was indeed some kind of extraordinary, ticking time-bomb type circumstance. Over a month. The United States barely escaped disolution by torturing this man repeatedly over the course of a month. Said torture, of course, providing no actionable intelligence whatever. But, somehow, that Saved America. Of course, we’re meant to forget that the CIA’s own inspector general has reported:

there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe

So neither safe nor effective. In fact, we got the only useful information from seized computers and voluntary statements. Everything gotten under torture was, apparently, either wrong or already known. Big surprise there.

But Meyer closes with a point we actually agree on:

By launching this latest attack on the CIA, the President has done more than merely throw a bone to his base. He has removed all remaining doubt about how the US now plans to confront the global threat of radical Islam.

Indeed, we plan to confront radical Islam by outreach, by education, and, when force is required, by following our own longstanding legal and military doctrines to the fullest extent possible.

And, lest we follow Cheney down the “only following orders” and “it’s not their fault, it’s not their fault, it’s not their fault!” rabbit hole, let’s remind ourselves of this particular outcome of our own Nuremberg Trials, a result of a defense so utterly discounted that it’s since become known as “The Nuremberg Defense”:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

Copland, Tiger, Box (A Clear Time Braid)

Perhaps the clearest sign of the Steve Jobs’ recent illness and attendant absence from day-to-day decisions over to One Infinite Loop is the Snow Leopard packaging:

snow leopard box

When I originally saw the leak of this, I assumed it must, must be a fake. And a bad one. But here it is.

Anywho, it marks an odd signpost in the evolution of Mac operating system naming… The first instance I can recall of Apple talking openly about future operating systems by code name (as opposed to simply saying “well, in System 7 we’ll have…” and so forth), came during the lead-up to System 8, then referred to by its public codename Copland. The follow-on (which, presumably, would have been System 9, but it never really got off the ground) was openly referred to as Gershwin. Internally, I believe Copland went by “Pink,” an outgrowth of the same project naming schema from the Taligent days, but that’s neither here nor there.

With the debut of MacOS X (initially called Rhapsody, but ultimately (and thankfully) re-branded as simply MacOS X, there began a new, cat-based public codename schema that Wikipedia does a very fine job of keeping track of:  Cheetah/Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and (now) Snow Leopard.

With all of that came a steady evolution in packaging design, also courtesy of Wikipedia:

MacOS X Boxes

As you can see, only Jaguar (better known as Jag-wire to one Steve Jobs) makes any reference whatsoever to the public codename, with its spotted X and box side. And this made inherent sense with what was going on under the hood: Jaguar was the first fully polished release of MacOS (to the original Cheetah/Puma first wide-release version which still had various usability or driver issues for certain users). So it seemed quite natural to echo the Aqua-themed original OS X box with a lightly updated, speed-oriented branding.

With the arrival of Panther, apple adopted the minimalistic metallic X, adding a spotlight effect to Tiger (highlighting, you guessed it, the debut of Spotlight searching technology in the OS). This notion was extended with the galaxy effect on Leopard; it kept the basic X design but highlighted and referenced Time Machine, the most notable addition to that OS.

Now we have, uh, a snowy cat. No X, and the codename is referenced directly on the packaging. Yikes. We also gain the subhead:

The world’s most advanced operating system. Finely tuned.

I see.

I understand that labelling it Mac OS X 10.6 is probably a non-starter for the marketing class, and is seen as insufficiently differentiated from whatever it is exactly that 10.5 might be. But I can’t be the only one that has difficulty recalling the order of these damned cats when named in isolation. Tiger was, er, a while ago…but was that 10.4? This seemingly benign issue gets all the more painful when you’re tracking down, say, a compatibility issue: will Google find more results referencing “Tiger” or “10.4” or “Mac” or “Macintosh” or “MacIntosh” or God knows what else? If we’re now going to actually call these operating systems by these names “officially” as opposed to “casually during a keynote when it doesn’t really matter” I can see some serious problems on the horizon, especially when they replace the actually informative 10.5.8 that “About this Mac” reports with “Lesser Plains Leopard” or some-such. However, it should be noted that this is the same company that differentiates a $3500 computer as “(Early 2008) Mac Pro” and assumes you can still easily sort out what you’ve got come 2010…

This is where I’m supposed to roll out my own, vastly better mockup, but you’re going to have to use your imagination caps to see it. The true precedent is with Jag-wire. It was the most conceptually similar release to the current iteration: essentially a big cleanup, with not that many Earth-shattering innovations. While it certainly held more fundamental fixes and so forth than Snow Leopard, the basic idea was very similar: make what we already have put together as good, as fast, and as functional as we possibly can. So, for 10.6 you keep the essential box of the immediate predecessor, Leopard. Perhaps you fade the galaxy a bit, but it’s still back there in its vaguely holographic form. Then you fill the big X with tasteful snow-leopard spots. And the title text? It’s relegated to the side, where it reads simply “Mac OS X Version 10.6.”

Is that so hard? Apparently without Steve Jobs around, it is.