Blog goes on sabbatical

I'm sitting for the New York Bar Exam in late July, and as a result, outragedmoderates.org will not be updated again regularly until after the exam. Wish me luck, and please do come back at the end of July.

- Thad

UPDATED 7/10/06:

Revised to include "regularly."

Born Fighting: Webb wins Virginia primary

James Webb, a Vietnam War hero who served as Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, won Virginia's Democratic Senate primary two weeks ago. [Washington Post] Webb, who left the Republican Party over his opposition to the Iraq war, is also known for his recent book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. [Amazon]

As a North Carolinian living in New York, Born Fighting has come in useful. In the South, white people are generally just referred to as "white"; it took me about five years to get used to New Yorkers asking me what my "background" was. "Well, I majored in Poli. Sci. in college." When they clarified that they were asking where my family was from, I'd say my mom was born in Alabama and grew up in Louisiana, and that my dad was from NC. "No, but before that?" "Oh, my ancestors were Scotch-Irish."

I was shocked by how connected New Yorkers were to their ancestors' countries of origin, even if their ancestors had become American citizens more than a century ago. As one white guy from Alabama told me during my first week in New York, "people here are really into their races - it's weird" (whereas, in the South, race is really more about color than ethnicity). Eventually, I came to realize that it wasn't a divisive thing (i.e. - if a pretty Italian girl asked you where your family was from, it didn't mean she was ruling out the possibility of dating); instead, it was just a way of preserving traditional cultures (which I think is a good thing).

Once I started thinking of myself as Scotch-Irish, and not just as white, I read up more on the history of the Scotch-Irish. It was then that I realized just how much of what I had always considered "North Carolinian," or "Southern" - from names to cultural traditions to philosophical leanings - could be traced to the Scotch-Irish settlers who arrived in the Southeast during the 18th century.

Webb's book about the Scotch-Irish (he uses "Scots-Irish") has been criticized for glossing over the group's role in some of the brutal episodes of American history. That's probably a fair criticism. That said, Webb's central thesis - that much of what people refer to as "red state" values can traced to Scots-Irish values - is extremely convincing. In a review of Born Fighting, Tom Wolfe summarized these core beliefs as follows: "our rights come from God, not the Government; all of us are born equal, and 'born aristocrats' don’t exist; and tread on either of those two truths, and we’ll fight you down to the last unbroken hyoid bone."

"Webb Wins Democratic Nomination in Virginia" [Washington Post]

Terror suspects arrested in Miami over Sears Tower plot

Seven men, including five American citizens, were arrested at a Miami warehouse today for allegedly conspiring to conduct attacks in the United States. Though authorities say that the threat of attacks was not immediate, the Muslim group had allegedly mentioned the Sears Tower in Chicago and an FBI building in Miami as possible targets.

"Anti-terror arrests made in Miami raid" [Miami Herald]

Even more evidence of global warming

The National Academy of Sciences has released a new report, in response to a request by the House Science Committee, which states that "[t]here is sufficient evidence from tree rings, retreating glaciers, and other 'proxies' to say with confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years." [BoingBoing]

When will all the right-wing conspiracy theorists, who claim that this is all some elaborate hoax intended to attack their ideology, just shut up and cut their losses? Someone should create a central database comprised solely of speeches and talk show appearances in which right-wingers claim that global warming doesn't exist. It would be interesting to see if any of them are still involved in politics fifteen or twenty years from now.

"NAS: Earth hottest it's been in 400 years, humans responsible" [BoingBoing]
"High Confidence in Surface Temp Reconstructions Since A.D. 1600" [The National Academies]

Dobbs: Congress stiffs working Americans

Lou Dobbs on Congress's decision to raise Congressional salaries while refusing to raise the minimum wage. [CNN]

Carolina Hurricanes bring Stanley Cup to Raleigh!

I can't believe a hockey team from my hometown just won the Stanley Cup - especially considering how hot it can get in North Carolina by mid-June. And yes, I'm definitely going to wear the Hurricanes shirt I got at the Sam's when I go to my bar review course at NYU today - even though I have to admit that I still think "icing" is that stuff you put on cupcakes.

"CANES CAPTURE CUP" [Raleigh News & Observer]
"So many emotions, events spill over with Cup win" [ESPN]
"I'm a redneck hockey fan" [Sporting News] (or, as my friend Ben from Charlotte said, isn't all hockey redneck hockey?)

Al Qaeda planned 2003 gas attack on NYC subway

TIME has a chilling excerpt from Ron Suskind's new book The One Percent Doctrine discussing an al Qaeda plot to use a lethal gas on the New York subway system. The attack was called off by the terror network's leadership just 45 days before the planned zero-hour.

"How an Al-Qaeda Cell Planned a Poison-gas Attack on the N.Y. Subway" [TIME]

10-step program for oil addiction

Popular Science has a fascinating new special section on solutions to the fossil-fuel crisis.

"The Future of Energy" [Popular Science]

Google introduces US gov't search

Google has a new search engine dedicated to US government websites, which also has a portal featuring press releases from the military and the White House, and news from media outlets like the Washington Post and Government Executive. This is a great idea - no more having to add ".gov" to a search to try to find primary source information about federal government issues. [Google U.S. Government Search]

(On a much, much less significant note, a search for this blog returns a comment someone made during a 2004 workshop the Federal Trade Commission held on noninfringing uses of P2P file-sharing.)

Al-Zarqawi document: "exaggerate the Iranian danger"

This alleged list of plans, found in the (un)safe house where Zarqawi was killed, discusses the current situation in Iraq, as well as al Qaeda plans to draw the Americans into war with Iran. The document notes that the best way to do this is to "exaggerate the Iranian danger and to convince America and the west in general, of the real danger coming from Iran" . . .

"Al-Zarqawi's alleged playbook" [CNN]

Supreme Court: Police don't have to knock anymore

I wonder what all of those self-described "libertarians" who supported Bush think about this one:

"Police don't have to knock, justices say" [CNN]

Fitzgerald: Rove won't be charged

Karl Rove will not be charged in the CIA leak case. [Washington Post] This doesn't really surprise me that much, given the complexity of the case, and the fact that Scooter Libby's indictments were not for the actual leak, but for subsequent offenses: perjury, making false statements, and obstruction of justice. Moreover, while this is definitely a legal victory for Rove, I don't know that the White House gains that much from the news. The White House's efforts to discredit Wilson - which were revealed in the course of the investigation, regardless of who else is indicted - were part of its unconscionable campaign to deceive the American people about Iraq.

More specifically, the attack against Wilson is just one of many examples of the Bush administration quashing dissent instead of learning from it. What if, instead of filing Joseph Wilson's report away, the Bush administration had listened to the former diplomat when he reported that Iraq had not purchased yellowcake from Niger? What if they had listened to Colin Powell when he warned them that the "Pottery Barn rule" would apply to Iraq ("If you break it, you own it")? [CBS News]

What if they had listened to former President George H. W. Bush? Here is an excerpt from 41's book "A World Transformed":

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome." [Global Security]

"The Wilson-Plame-Novak-Rove Blame Game" [FactCheck.org]

Former Atlanta mayor sentenced to prison for corruption

Earlier today, Bill Campbell, a Democrat who served as mayor of Atlanta from 1994-2002, was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $6,000 for racketeering and tax evasion charges. [CNN] Campbell is a Raleigh, NC native, and at age seven, he became the first black child to attend the city's public schools after it began the integration process in 1960. [News & Observer]

Campbell's years as Atlanta's mayor were among the most prosperous in the city's history, and some pundits even mentioned him as a possible running mate for Al Gore in 2000. But the Department of Justice's corruption investigation began to dampen Campbell's future in politics. Today, as he read the former mayor his sentence, U.S. District Judge Richard Story said:

"Yes, Bill Campbell, you did good things, and there is a person in this room that recognizes this," Story said, referring to himself. He cited Campbell's work in improving public housing in Atlanta as an example. But the judge added that during the trial he "was overcome, almost appalled, at the breadth of misconduct in your administration." [CNN]

"Atlanta's former mayor sentenced to prison" [CNN]

The debt crisis

The NY Times Magazine has a fascinating (and scary) article on the debt crisis:

Not only do Americans borrow as never before; they also save remarkably little. The impressive resilience of American consumer spending in the past 15 years has been based partly on a collapse in the personal savings rate from around 7.5 percent of income to below zero. The aggregate national savings rate, which includes the public sector and corporations, averaged 13 percent in the 1960's. Last year it was just 0.8 percent . . .

. . . The average American has an income of about $40,000 a year and has, as we have seen, a personal savings rate of zero. The average Chinese earns around $1,500 per year but has personal savings of 23 percent of his income — and is lending a large chunk of these savings, via the People's Bank of China, to the average American.

Historian Niall Ferguson: "Reasons to Worry" [New York Times]

Manatee removed from Florida's endangered list

One childhood memory I'll never forget is seeing a yellow "Beware of Manatees" sign on the docks in Beaufort, North Carolina (pronounced "Bo-fort," unlike South Carolina's Beaufort, where "Beau-" is pronounced the way it is in "beautiful"), complete with a street-sign-style depiction of the strange animal. As I got older, I would go back to the same docks, and every single time, I'd swear to whoever was with me that there used to be a "Beware of Manatees" sign there as a child, half-wondering if I was making the whole thing up. Years later, I'm proud to point out that several online encyclopedias list Beaufort, NC as the Northern limit of the Florida Manatee's range - so maybe I wasn't crazy after all, and the sign really did exist at one point. [eNature.com]

On Wednesday, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission voted unanimously to remove the Florida Manatee from the state's endangered species list. [NY Times] The main reason? The Florida Manatee population has grown from 1,000 to 3,000 during the last 30 years. Here's to another three productive decades for the species once known as the "sea cow."

UPDATED 6/10/06:

The New York Times artice mentioned that there has been criticism of the decision to change the Florida Manatee's status. The main arguments are that the requirements for being "endangered" (as compared to merely "threatened," to which the species is being downgraded) are too strict, and that the manatee population will drop rapidly if protections are loosened. Here's a sampling of coverage from Florida:

"Manatee madness makes mercury rise at meeting" [TCPalm]
"State drops endangered designation for manatees" [Herald Tribune]
"Let science govern choices on species" [Miami Herald]
"Die Faster, Manatees" [The Ledger]
"State agency's downlisting would be a victory of politics over protection" [Florida Today]
Save the Manatee Club [savethemanatee.org]

UPDATED 8/8/06:

File this under "things that don't necessarily prove that global warming is happening, but are pretty convincing evidence":

"Massive Manatee Is Spotted in Hudson River" [New York Times]

US airstrike kills al-Zarqawi

The leader of al Qaeda's operations in Iraq was killed by a US airstrike roughly 40 miles north of Baghdad today. [CNN] In addition, US troops found a "treasure trove" of information in Zarqawi's hideout. [NPR] NBC has a report on how US forces found Zarqawi. [MSNBC]

It remains to be seen how Zarqawi's death will impact al Qaeda's operations in Iraq, but it definitely represents a major victory for US forces. William Arkin has an interesting post on the operation to take out Zarqawi, as well as the varied reactions to it. [Washington Post]

Proposed amendment banning gay marriage fails

Today, the Senate defeated a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. [Washington Post] Lou Dobbs has an excellent column calling the proposed constitutional amendment "sheer nonsense." [CNN] One thing Dobbs doesn't mention is how out of place such an amendment would seem.

Only six amendments have been passed since World War II, and all of them dealt with electoral procedures of one sort or another. Amendments XXII-XXVII set Presidential term limits (XXII), provided electoral representation for the District of Columbia (XXIII), banned poll taxes (XXIV), clarified the line of sucession in cases of Presidential death or resignation (XXV), set the voting age at 18 (XXVI), and banned in-term raises for congressional salaries (XXVII). [National Archives] Wouldn't a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage be an absurd addition to that list?

And wouldn't a federal ban on states adopting gay marriage go against the doctrine of "federalism," which conservatives always claim as one of their key principles? Once again, it seems that the far right only believes in "states' rights" when it helps promote their ideology. In my opinion, federalism seems like the inevitable answer to the gay marriage issue - eventually, the more liberal states will probably adopt it, while the more conservative states will never allow it.

The public policy exception to the full faith and credit clause would probably allow states to refuse to recognize other states' gay marriages (this will be decided in the courts). [Slate] Moreover, the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act allows states to refuse to recognize other states' gay marriage laws, and 39 states have their own defense of marriage acts. [Slate] In other words, it is extremely unlikely that conservative states will ever be forced to recognize gay marriages - and this is why a conservative like Dobbs is calling the proposed amendment "an insult to the intelligence of every voter, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative." [CNN]

Conservatives for gay sexual abuse

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Bush administration is removing guidelines from the Army field manual that banned "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners, pursuant to Article III of the Geneva Conventions. [Los Angeles Times] Andrew Sullivan has an excellent piece on this and other important developments in the torture controversy, including Bush's use of a signing statement to void the McCain amendment requiring compliance with Article III. [Daily Dish]

It is mind-boggling to think that the same administration that is pushing for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage would be dropping regulations designed to prevent the "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners - which, in the case of Abu Ghraib, often involved forced homosexual contact between Muslim detainees. In other words, the Bush administration believes that the federal Constitution should have a provision banning marriages between loving gay couples, but that the Army field manual should not have any restrictions against forcing straight detainees to participate in homosexual conduct. (For example, this disturbing photo shows two Abu Ghraib detainees being forced to simulate oral sex, while others, ordered to masturbate, stand in the background.)

Here's an excerpt from a May 2004 Seymour Hersh article on the neocons' obsession with using sexual humiliation as a tool against Muslim detainees (see Hersh's book Chain of Command for an extended discussion of this):

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private." The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—"one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, "I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population." The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. [The New Yorker]

I don't understand how anyone, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation, could support the Bush administration's strategy of using sexual humiliation as a tactic. And as a straight man, it is especially hard to imagine how Bush's base - which is dominated by conservative, straight men - can rally behind the federal government forcing straight male detainees to engage in homosexual conduct.

"Army Manual to Skip Geneva Detainee Rule" [Los Angeles Times]
"We Torture" [The Daily Dish]
"The Gray Zone" [The New Yorker]

RFK Jr.: Did Bush steal the 2004 election?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the top environmental lawyers in the country, has a new article in Rolling Stone on the question of whether the 2004 election was thrown. As someone who studied polling as a political science major, I was more than a little shocked by the media's "I guess all the exit polls were just wrong" mantra in the aftermath of the election. After all, exit polls have existed since the 1940's, and they have become more accurate with time.

I'm not saying that I'm sure Bush stole the election, but at this point, I sure wouldn't put it past these people.

"Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [Rolling Stone]

UPDATED 6/4/06:

Here's a retort to Kennedy's article - "Was the 2004 Election Stolen? No." [Salon]

UPDATED 6/6/06:

Another discussion of Kennedy's article - "Is RFK, Jr. Right About Exit Polls?" [Mystery Pollster]

Homeland Security: NYC has no national monuments or icons at risk of terrorist attack

When I was deciding whether to stay and take the bar exam here in New York, one of the things in the "Cons" list was the high likelihood that New York City will be hit by another terrorist attack during the next 3-4 years. During the six years I've lived here, I've experienced 9/11 from a skyscraper in Midtown, been informed that anthrax had been detected less than six blocks from where I was sitting, watched from from the 27th floor of my company's building as the NYPD detonated a suspicious package in the middle of Third Avenue, sat on the E train and watched as jittery counterterrorism agents shined their flashlights into the tunnel under the East River, and been evacuated from Grand Central Station during a bomb threat.

Every single person living in New York since 9/11 has dealt with this kind of stuff on a regular basis. But despite New York's continually high threat level, the Department of Homeland Security is cutting the city's funding, because the agency found that "New York City has no national monuments or icons that would be at risk of terrorist attack." [Washington Post] Mayor Bloomberg responded: "I don't have to list the Brooklyn Bridge, the United Nations and Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building and the Stock Exchange . . . So you really wonder what was going through somebody's mind." [Washington Post]

Bloomberg left out plenty of other candidates for the list, including Ellis Island, Times Square (which is as much a symbol of American capitalism as the World Trade Center was), Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, the Guggenheim, and the new World Trade Center site, currently under construction, which seems like a pretty obvious candidate for any list of terrorism targets.

There is no doubt that terrorism is a national threat, and considering that generating fear is the primary goal of terrorism, one can imagine terrorists targeting a smaller city, to show Americans that nowhere is safe. But the funds to protect these smaller cities should not be taken from New York and Washington, the two Americans cities which have actually been attacked. Mayor Bloomberg put it best: "When you stop a terrorist, they have a map of New York City in their pocket. They don't have a map of any of the other 45 places." [Washington Post]

"Anti-Terror Funding Cut in D.C. and New York" [Washington Post]