Via Talking Poinst Memo, Mancow lasts six seconds before deciding waterboarding is torture:
"If I'd known it was going to be this bad, I never would have done it."
As TPM noted, "remember: this was in a controlled setting where the victim knew he wasn't going to be harmed."
Or was he really the biggest reason for the failures of the last administration? Robert Draper's account in GQ of Rumsfeld's incompetence doesn't address this specific question, but it does lay out in painful detail how Rumsfeld may have been Bush's worst liability with the possible exception of Dick Cheney:
"What rumsfeld was most effective in doing," says a former senior White House official, "was not so much undermining a decision that had yet to be made as finding every way possible to delay the implementation of a decision that had been made and that he didn’t like." ...
The Department of Justice got a taste of such stalling tactics two months after September 11, when the president issued an order authorizing the establishment of military commissions to try suspected terrorists. Rumsfeld resisted this imposition of authority on his DoD turf. "We tried to get these military commissions up and running," recalls one former DoJ official. "There'd be a lot of 'Well, he’s working on it.' In my own view, that’s cost the administration a lot. Hearings for detainees would’ve been viewed one way back in 2002. But by 2006"—the year commissions were at last enacted—"it's not so appealing."
Some of Rumsfeld's greatest damage came during the Katrina response:
The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, "that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more."
The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, "Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what's on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”
Great article, long overdue.
Tom Vanderbilt on Slate points out that U.S. rail travel was better in the Harding administration than it is today:
[T]he most striking aspect of [1940s train timetables] is found in the tiny agate columns of arrivals and destinations. It is here that one sees the wheels of progress actually running backward. The...Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York's Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal's (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little more than nine hours later. To make that journey today, from New York's Penn Station on the Adirondack, requires a nearly 12-hour ride. The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak's Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours. Going from Brattleboro, Vt., to New York City on the Boston and Maine Railroad's Washingtonian took less than five hours in 1938; today, Amtrak's Vermonter (the only option) takes six hours—if it's on time, which it isn't, nearly 75 percent of the time.
What happened? I put the question to James McCommons, author of the forthcoming book Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service. As with most historical declines, there is no single culprit but rather a complex set of conditions.
In sum, cars, trailer trucks, and airplanes happened. On the other hand, as Vanderbilt mentions, other countries seem to manage. The Madrid to Barcelona train in Spain (which travels mainly on the plain) gets passengers between the cities quickly enough to compete seriously with air travel. Imagine if the Acela went near its top speed from Washington to New York, and got people to Penn Station in under two hours. Do you think the Delta Shuttle would have problems competing against that?
Interesting article.
(...at least, by the New Jersey plan). Five of these united States now allow people who love each other to get married regardless of gender: Maine's governor signed his state's bill into law this afternoon.
Once more: where's Illinois? We're at least as progressive as Connecticut. Come on.
A gay marriage bill has passed Maine's lower house, and goes back to the Maine Senate for final approval tomorrow.
The AP reports: "The proposal would make Maine the fifth state to allow gay marriage. But it's unclear whether Gov. John Baldacci would sign it. Baldacci remains undecided. Four states now allow same-sex marriages: Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa by court orders and Vermont through legislation. New Hampshire's Legislature is actively considering a gay marriage bill."
Come on! Where's the Illinois bill, guys?
Via Bruce Schneier, a poll finds that only 21% of Americans surveyed know how big a trillion is. Possibly because some of them were taught by this clown.
Via Sullivan, Pew has some interesting data on the differences in opinions about torture held by religious Christians and godless atheists:
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed....
Therefore, as Sullivan points out, "Christian devotion correlates with approval for absolute evil in America. And people wonder why atheism is gaining in this country." (Emphasis his.)
...hmm....feels the same...
I'm really not sure from where the panic over H1N1 (swine) flu comes, but I have some faith that it's going to kill more people than the virus. Take, for example, the mad rush to buy hand sanitizer:
Stores are quickly being depleted of products used to help stave off or battle the flu, a combination of swine, bird and human virus strains that in some cases has been fatal. The disease is suspected in at least 160 deaths, the majority in Mexico. The only reported U.S. death was that of a toddler in Houston.
There are nine probable cases in Illinois, five of them in Chicago, the Illinois Department of Public Health reported Wednesday. An elementary school on the city’s North Side was shut down Wednesday after a child was diagnosed with what is believed to be swine flu.
I don't have the exact numbers here, but I would imagine that more than one extra person will die and more than nine extra people will be injured because of people driving to the store to buy hand sanitizer than would otherwise be killed or injured without the extra driving. It's like the rise in traffic fatalities after 9/11, attributed to a mix of more driving and stress, both of which came at least partially from blind fear.
Of course, it's possible that this flu could be the end of civilization. History suggests otherwise.
But if it makes people feel better, by all means jump in your cars and buy toxic chemicals to rub on your hands in a futile effort to kill invisible agents of your...um...sneezing. Even better if you drive to the store without wearing a seatbelt.
...the New Hampshire legislature has authorized gay marriage. It should be law in a week or two, depending on whether Gov. John Lynch signs it. (It will likely become law if he vetoes it; it'll just take longer.)
Legislators in Maine introduced a likely-to-pass bill this week. And to think, 300 years ago New England was a theocracy.