Accismus

I stepped up to an ATM the other day, and discovered the fellow there before me had left his card in the machine.  I ran out with it, but he had gone, so, after some deliberation, I put it in my wallet to take home and cut up, and completed my own transaction.

Two days later, I opened my wallet to get out my debit card, and found only the stranger’s there.  I must have left mine behind in the same ATM.

Well, since Wesley Clark brought it up, does military service make for better presidential leadership, or no?

. . . [H]istory is agnostic on whether great warriors make great presidents. In the “yea” column you’ll find George Washington. Because I’m feeling generous . . . I’ll thow in Teddy Roosevelt. And if you insist that I expand the column to include borderline cases, we could also talk about Andrew Jackson. . ., Harry Truman, and Ike. The “nay” column is far longer, so I’ll just hit the highlights: Zachary Taylor, U.S. Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, John Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and, of course, George W. Bush.  Perhaps more interesting than any of the above, though, is this: the nation’s two greatest commanders in chief, and, not coincidentally, two greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never served in the military.

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Much about Obama’s tax plan here:

. . . [I]n a better world, the findings from the TPC report would squelch the anti-Obama chatter around his tax plan vs. McCain’s. In that distortion chamber, the fact that Obama raises taxes on families with incomes above $250,000, and only on those families, morphs into a big tax increase on the middle class ($250K and up gets you in the top 3-4 percent, by the way). The report (compare tbls 1 and 6), in fact, clearly shows how topsy-turvy that critique really is. Obama’s middle-class tax cut, about $1,000, is three times that of McCain’s, about $300. Obama cuts the taxes of 81 percent of families; McCain, 56 percent.

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Why the SC’s decision on the D.C. gun ban might be great for the Democrats:

. . . [T]he Court went and struck down the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, a decision that, for reasons cultural and chronological, will cast a shadow over every other case this term. And that, I’m convinced, is one of the best gifts the Court has given a democrat since West Coast Hotel. The reasons are simple: D.C. v. Heller takes the Court off the table as an electoral liability, and it takes the National Rifle Association off the table as an electoral threat. The first part of that claim is easy enough: a term that ends with a landmark conservative decision will not be easily spun into an urgent need to remedy what McCain has called federal judges who have “little regard for the authority of the president, the Congress, and the states.”

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And, too, this:

It is possible that Obama does not realize this because he has been imbibed by so much of the propaganda of quislingism and if that is the case as I believe it to be then I tremulantly recommend we halt the malmish adulation heaped upon wretched misfits. If anything Obama has hair in his brain and even though we all are to some extent as hairy Obama sets the bar on the curve that much higher up the mountain.

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Speaking of being pedantic, y’all:  apparently, we’re not supposed to say “correlation does not imply causation.”  Oops.

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The U.S. is suffering from a decline in foreign tourists.  To remedy this, those tourists will now be charged $10 upon their arrival on U.S. soil.

I just want to say that I was charged an exit fee when I went through the Bangkok airport, despite a layover there being the only time I spent in Thailand (about two hours, total, never leaving the airport).  I had gone from one terminal to the check-in desk, and back again, after somebody wrongly told me this was the only way to change from the small Malaysian airline I’d flown in on, to another, larger flight for which I’d booked an entirely different ticket.  When I tried to reenter the terminal after checking in, not only was I forced to pay an exit fee, but in order to do so, I had to exchange money into freaking baht at an airport currency exchange counter.   Man, was I pissed.

I don’t know what that has to do with anything, really, but it feels good to share.

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Humanitarian intervention is one of those complicated issues:

Contrast this with the economists’ way of approaching matters: will intervening do more harm than good? Would this law or that do more harm than good? Sociologists would be another case for comparison: whilst political philosophers (of the Rawlsian/Kantian variety) are predisposed to see democratic institutions as a requirement of justice, sociologists are likely to ask hard questions about whether this or that society has the social structure or culture that makes democracy possible. Historians might ask whether democracies intervening in non-democratic cultures have more often tended to be benign or, alternatively, genocidal.

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Battered animals have 3,800 shelters.  Battered women have 1,500:

A woman who fundraises for a charity dedicated to helping battered women recently told me about her challenges raising money. Called the Retreat, the charity is located in East Hampton, a posh beach community, full of people who make philanthropy a part of their financial and social lives. Yet she struggles to find donors. In response to her requests, she often hears, “Well, no one I would know would be a victim of domestic violence. Besides, I already give money to the animal rescue charity.” The animal rescue charity is one of the best endowed in the area.

I actually have a lot to say about philanthropy focused on animal abuse in general (please don’t infer from my not going into it that I am against such efforts overall), but I’m too tired this morning to articulate my opinions on the matter in an intelligent and mature way.

So, I’ll just limit my remarks to VOMIT!!!!

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Finally, the Phelps family is a good example of just how nuanced hatred can be:

Whence the hatred of a fellow Baptist, a man who seemed to share so many of Westboro’s grotesque views? The answer lies in the past of Falwell himself and of the Phelps family. Falwell was a shameless racist, and the Phelps family were, incredible as it may seem, pioneers of integration in their hometown of Topeka. The Phelps family’s law practice, headed formerly by the patriarch himself, Fred Phelps, took civil rights cases, often for black plaintiffs who had failed to find representation elsewhere. The Phelpses viewed racial discrimination as un-American and contrary to Biblical teaching, and their work helped to effectuate the Brown decision.

See?  Just because somebody’s entire life consists of waving ‘fag-enabler’ signs at funerals, does not mean you should assume they’re racist, as well.

Dahlia Lithwick on what’s at stake with the next Supreme Court appointment (it’s more than just Roe v. Wade):

Justice John Paul Stevens is 88, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75. David Souter is 68, and it’s widely rumored in legal circles that he wants out (see, New Hampshire, above). All three of these jurists recently voted against the proposition that the government can call you an enemy combatant based on your last name or area code, then hold you without charges for six years at Guantanamo Bay, on the promise that you’re either a bad guy, or will very likely become one after being held for six years without charges at Guantanamo Bay. If just one of these three were to retire, we could easily return to a world in which decisions about who is or isn’t a so-called “enemy combatant” are made by the military, in secret, and with roughly the same sophistication that seventh-grade girls use to decide who’s “popular.”

Also in Slate, on the legality of torture:

If we manage to erase one hideously bad idea from our collective memories of the law in the war on terror, please, please let it be this one: Legal questions are neither “hard,” nor “novel,” nor “open” merely because someone at the White House didn’t like the legal answer that followed them. Easy questions don’t morph into tough ones just because you can find some guy willing to argue the other side.

Bush and McCain have both scoffed at the notion of serving terrorists with papers. Here are a number of reasons why military action may not always be the best solution to terrorism:

First, terrorists often operate in our country, or in friendly countries, which makes military action against them tricky. McCain (through his campaign blog) assailed Obama for favoring “prosecutors rather than predators.” But, when the terrorists are holed up in New York City, as was the case with the 1993 bombers Obama referred to, simply arresting them strikes me as more efficient than leveling their apartment with a drone-fired missile.

(via Yglesias)

In sum, don’t hate on the law. As Matthew Yglesias explains, it’s the law that keeps America from the type of corruption common in countries like Russia:

Here if the government were to ask telecom firms to illegally cooperate with an illegal surveillance operation, we’d ensure the rule of law continues to operate by changing the law so that complying with such requests will be legal in the future and also bestowing retroactive immunity on the cooperating firms. And if the Vice President’s top aide were convicted of a crime, the president would need to step in and commute his sentence. It’s these kind of procedures that keep our country safe and free!

We are a civilized nation, after all.

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And then, there’s Burma. Here is a detailed explanation of why reform just is not happening there:

In the case of Burma under General Than Shwe and his military junta, no carrots have been tried, to my knowledge. Sticks in many shapes and sizes have been brandished and swung, to little effect. Economic sanctions, asset freezes, arms embargos and travel bans are currently in effect by the US and EU. I posed the question to a Burmese dissident last week. He reflected a moment, then smiled and said, ‘A missile launch pad in Thailand, that’s all we need’. No sticks, no carrots, just elimination: everyman’s fantasy. Were regime change so easy!

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And in Mumbai, people are seriously starving…

“Car-bound charity” is typical in India, where “feudal giving” (e.g, when a patron pays school tuition for the children of his household’s maid) also accounts for much of the nation’s charitable work, reinforcing household and societal chains of command. Anonymous or “checkbook charity” is more popular in Western countries, where parading the poor out on the streets is considered degrading. Drive-by charity, however altrusitic, is clearly not going to cut it as India tries to deal with the global food crisis. As of 2006, the country already ranked 96th — below Nepal and Pakistan — on the Global Hunger Index.

…and China has been buying up the manhole covers.

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On a lighter note, here are some tips on how to take better candid shots. The trouble with candid shots (I’ve found) is that they tend to piss people off. See if you can guess which of these shots from my party on Saturday are candids, and which are posed:

This site is pretty much a win-win: it flatters your intelligence while donating rice to the Great Unfed. What could be better?

Merry Christmas (or Whatever), readers! We’ll meet again in the new year.