Tag: yep

“Exigent Circumstances” Are All Circumstances

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sole defender of your Fourth Amendment rights:

How “secure” do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?

Lawyers, Guns, and Money is particularly trenchant in response:

it’s the latest example of the drift of the exigency exception away from actual emergencies and toward the mere convenience of the police. If the police have time to obtain a warrant and there isn’t an actual emergency, they should be required to obtain one.

Yep. Why is this (seemingly) so difficult to a) understand –and– b) get the general public agitated about? Today it’s suspected drug dealers and suspected terrorists whose rights are summarily discarded in the name of “exigency.” Next it will be suspected whatevers. Some time after that, you’ll have no recourse whatsoever to stop the police from randomly entering your house and ransacking it for evidence of crime, any crime, at any moment they care to do so. Exigency!

When literally everything is an extension of the War on Drugs/Terror/bogeyman-of-the-day, then everything is easy to deem simply too exigent to bother getting a warrant. Indefinite detention without charge, assassination of US citizens (without trial), a gulag off the coast and a chain of secret prisons beyond that gulag, and now further, near-unanimous defenestration of our most basic rights.

Seriously, is any of this, even a hint of it, worth whatever public policy victory we think we’re getting out of it, even using the most optimistic possible reading of (in this case) the War on Drugs? I don’t see how anyone could think so.

Shocking. Overall economic growth and employment were both dramatically higher post Clinton tax hikes than post Bush tax cuts. It’s almost, almost like tax cutting doesn’t guarantee economic boom days. Almost.

This should be sitting behind every Democrat in each and every public appearance until it is indelibly burned into the retinas of each and every voter in the most distant reaches of East Turkmenistan and Americans simply cry a few involuntary tears when it’s brought out yet again. Then you can start cleaning out the tax reforms barn once and for all.

Source: tnr.com

Biology is special that way, [with real success often arriving in mid- or even late-career, after a few false starts and fruitless sidetracks]. It takes years for people to get a feeling for the organism—for how nature actually works. Young people come in all the time knowing a bunch of fancy math. They say, ‘What if it’s like this computational model, this physical problem?’ They’re terrific ideas, but they’re wrong. Nothing works the way you think it should.

David Eagleman, aforementioned graduate student, now running his own lab. Presumably with a few bags of potatoes stashed around there somewhere.
But: yep.
Source: newyorker.com

I’m dying for Atlas to Shrug. Go off into your bunker and leave the piles of paper leverage the myth of the self-made man is built upon where they are so good people who selflessly believe in each other and this country can clean up the mess. I have a feeling we’ll be just fine, thank you, prophecies of doom and dollar signs etched in the sky notwithstanding.

correlationstonone, writing in Making nothing out of something: Self-Indulgent Programming Note 
Holy Zombie Lord Jesus: YES. Let me heartily second that motion that the Tea Klanners and all their like-minded friends should just Shrug already. Go live in Galt’s Gulch, live the dream, let the market sort you out, and spend the rest of your ample free time quarrying some stone or whatever it is good objectivists do for fun. I’d pay for closed-circuit coverage of it.
Yes, in gold.

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey recently claimed that “the intelligence that led to bin Laden . . . began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” That is false.

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator — none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden — was obtained through standard, noncoercive means. […]

As we debate how the United States can best influence the course of the Arab Spring, can’t we all agree that the most obvious thing we can do is stand as an example of a nation that holds an individual’s human rights as superior to the will of the majority or the wishes of government? Individuals might forfeit their life as punishment for breaking laws, but even then, as recognized in our Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, they are still entitled to respect for their basic human dignity, even if they have denied that respect to others.

John McCain, The Washington Post, May 12, 2011

Good thing this guy never ran for President. Would’ve been a tough out against all Democratic comers.

h/t: kohenari

(via politicalprof)

The Birther Disgrace | FrumForum

Yet even now, the racialist aspect of the anti-Obama movement has not subsided. Trump has moved from the birth certificate to questioning the president’s academic qualifications for the Harvard Law School. Trump himself was a troubled student (at one point he attended a military school) who nonetheless gained admission to Wharton. His father’s wealth and business success cannot have hurt with that application. Yet he feels himself qualified to pronounce on who is and who is not smart enough to attend Harvard Law. Barack Obama graduated magna cum laude. (And to anticipate a new line of attack – yes, Harvard Law School exams were blind-graded.) He was elected editor of the law review. And his classmates, left and right, universally admired his abilities.

Yep. I’d even leave aside Trump’s (or, for that matter, Obama’s) high school or undergraduate experience. One of them probably got a poor mark in first grade deportment too; that second semester is a killer in Mrs. Jones’ class. But I could truly care less whether either got a “gentleman’s C” in Introduction to Psychology or what-have-you. What happened overall? Where did they go with their respective opportunities, whether it was earned or given?

Obama took his chance and has, by and large, tried to use it for something bigger and better than simple personal achievement and made a tidy living along the way (people tend to forget he’s an entirely self-made millionaire, after all. Worked into a modicum of national prominence, took his chance and gave a killer speech at the DNC, and has basically milked that ever since. In the best sense of the term “milk,” of course.).
Trump, on the other hand, is something of a societal parasite. Bankrupt at least three times and generally in the swoop in and use somebody else’s money to capitalize on a given situation that may or may not turn a profit…ultimately producing nothing but worse architectural outcomes for cities like New York. Working only from this weirdly myopic perspective that Trump seems to be inviting, I think I take Obama without hesitation, thank you very much.

(via militantagnostic)

The Birther Disgrace | FrumForum

When Republicans reached basic consensus about what they wanted to do [relative to Ryan’s plan], they then delegated the details to a small group of people who fleshed out the plan, it was then presented to the caucus and within a week they had the vote. Democrats, by contrast, put their health reform plans through an agonizing months-long process of public intra-party disputes. That gave people who didn’t care about the details tons and tons of time to organize a backlash while tending to signal to low-information voters that Democrats were doing something controversial even among their own partisans. The backlash against Medicare privatization is overwhelmingly likely to grow over time, but it’s also the case that between today and November 2012 other events will intervene and crowd the agenda space possibly letting members off the hook for an unpopular vote.

Matt Yglesias on the key differences between how the GOP and Democratic Caucuses operate.

The Shinning

In which Matt Miller channels The Shining:

The House Republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt in the next decade yet the GOP is balking at raising the debt limit. The House Republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt in the next decade yet the GOP is balking at raising the debt limit.

[…]

“The spending spree is over,” Ryan said the other day, after the House passed his blueprint. “We cannot keep spending money we don’t have.” Except that by his own reckoning Ryan is planning to spend $6 trillion we don’t have in the next decade alone.

[…]

If I were Barack Obama, my mantra on this week’s debt tour and in the months ahead would be that we should lift the debt limit only by as much debt as is needed to accommodate Paul Ryan’s budget.

The Shinning