For the Record

Happy days are here again

OK, maybe that's a bit pollyanna of me.  Still, one can't but feel optimistic after Barack's first week in office brought these tidings of great joy (among many others):

Obama signs executive orders closing Guantanamo, closing CIA detention centers around the world, and banning the use of torture in interrogations.

Obama's first call to a foreign leader is to Mahmoud Abbas; he chooses Lebanese-American George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East; he speaks up for Palestinians.

Obama reverses the "gag order" on funding to organizations providing abortions or abortion information.

Obama pledges to lift ban on federal funding of stem cell research.

Obama announces plans to fast-track regulation of the financial industry.

You can keep up with the good news here.

Epic fail

Nick Burbules (editor of the invaluable Progressive Blog Digest) is devoting today's post to summarizing some of the truly astonishing low-lights of the catastrophic Bush presidency.  Goodbye and good riddance to that illegally installed ignoramus and his malignant manipulators.

Of course, the Bush/Cheney "legacy" will long be with us---in millions of lives destroyed and relatedly, in a fundamentalist Islamic community that has been handed all the ideological ammunition it could ever want; in an economy trashed by deregulation; in government offices heavily populated with incompetent cronies; and so on.

Perhaps the biggest legacy, in the long run (putting aside the now increased possibilities of world-wide destruction, of both climatic and non-climatic varieties) is not so different, when you think about it, from that the Germans inherited: the knowledge that our government can be hijacked, and that many of us will go along for the ride, cheering along the way.

Here, as there, the biggest questions for the future are: can we prevent this from ever happening again?  And if so, how? 

I don't have an answer to the second question (though again, we might look to Germany for some ideas).  However, it seems that a necessary condition on the bare possibility of future prevention is that we recognize, not just as individuals but as a nation, that in the installation and the implementation of the Bush/Cheney regime gross wrongs occurred.  Without public recognition of that fact---of the sort that effective investigations, into (a) the crimes of the Bush administration, and (b) of the institutional and personal mechanisms (within the judiciary, the legislature, the military, governmental offices, and the media as well as the executive offices) allowing the associated gross wrongs, might be expected to produce---no change to these mechanisms will occur, and the conditions for future usurpation of our government in service of vile and unconscionable ends will remain intact.

Grateful for small favors

More house members stood up to Israel today than in 2006.

Where's the 'science' in political science?

Krugman says:

[O]nly about 60 percent of the Obama plan consists of public spending. The rest consists of tax cuts — and many economists are skeptical about how much these tax cuts, especially the tax breaks for business, will actually do to boost spending. (A number of Senate Democrats apparently share these doubts.)

Skeptical?  Doubtful?  The U.S. and most other countries have been doing trickle-down for decades now.  Why isn't the efficacy (or not) of these sorts of manoeuvres an empirically established fact?  I take it that, as a matter of fact, big tax cuts typically don't end up much stimulating the general economy, but evidently it's better to pretend that there is a live debate about all this, and better yet to pretend that the debate is grounded in ultimately "partisan" concerns.  Better, that is, than simply admitting that the real function of the cuts is to buy off conservative and business elements---in this case, so that the real job of spending-based stimulation of the economy can get done.

Cheney hotfooting it on out

Thank god -- I can't wait for Cheney to retire and leave the world alone.  Check out Vanity Fair's oral history of the Bush legacy, and in particular Lawrence Wilkerson's brilliant commentary on how effectively Cheney inserted himself into the vacuum he knew would be left by Bush.  That Cheney would say that Bush "called the shots" is completely in line with Wilkerson's on Cheney as the ultimate Darth Vader bureaucrat: a master of under the radar manipulation.   That guy is one evil SOB.  I only advise that no one go near the rivers he plans to fish in---you might end up with a hook in your face.