What is "the Left"?

The Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has no articulated vision of a good, or even of a better, society. In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest. And since the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a conservative.

-- Tony Judt, "The Social Question Redivivus," in Reappraisals, p. 427.

... Judt's particularly discussing the European left, but I recognize the application to America as well. Compare this Crooked Timber post.

... Interview with Judt here. Ill Fares the Land is a short hardcover with few words per page, which for its ostensible purpose ought to've been published as a paperback original; but then, Judt probably needs the money, poor guy.

Dep't of Just Wow

The GOP demonstrates why immigration is not necessarily a winning issue for it:

“I think we should catch ’em, we should document ’em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going,” said Pat Bertroche, an Urbandale physician. “I actually support microchipping them. I can microchip my dog so I can find it. Why can’t I microchip an illegal?"

Uh, because he doesn't belong to you, Dr. Bertroche?

Bertroche is "one of seven Republicans running in the 3rd District Congressional primary" in Iowa.

Via Sullivan.

Silly voters!

Labour was already running 3d in the polls, but with some chance of retaining a majority/plurality of seats in the Commons, but Gordon Brown may have just handed Parliament over to his opponents, with his live-mike comment about a "Mrs. Duffy" with whom he'd just spoken about immigration:

Brown: That was a disaster. Well I just ... should never have put me in [with!] that woman. Whose idea was that?

Aide: I don't know, I didn't see.

Brown: It was Sue [Nye] I think. It was just ridiculous.

Aide: I'm not sure if they [the media] will go with that.

Brown: They will go with that.

Aide: What did she say?

Brown: Oh everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman. She said she used be Labour. I mean it's just ridiculous.

That should be even better than "all of them" for the opposition.

A cure for wingnuttery

Departure from public office? Seems to've worked for Bill Frist:

Frist, a thoracic surgeon, told Time magazine back in October that if he were still in Congress, he would vote for the bill. And his support apparently hasn’t wavered. On Monday afternoon he said he would give an “A” grade to the provisions in the law aimed at expanding insurance to an additional 32 million people. Cost, however, is another matter. While most Republicans would likely slap a failing grade on the cost aspect of the law, Frist said he’d rank it a “C.”

“I like the bill,” Frist said during a panel discussion with former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle at the American Hospital Association’s (AHA’s) annual meeting. “I think it’s got lots of positive stuff in it, other than the costs."

Of course, lowering costs was not actually the goal of the bill. But leave that aside.

Frist also thinks little of the argument that the law is unconstitutional. Look for his excommunication to be broadcast live on Fox.

Seriously, though, Frist is merely giving qualified endorsement to National Romneycare. There is something unhealthy about a political party where *that* is something only a retired politician dares utter.

Emptywheel, who turns out to know something about oil rig safety (and evasions thereof) as well as about torture, posts on the BP disaster last weekend that left 11 dead, and notes that BP's rig safety has been wanting in the past. She relays this ...

BP Exploration & Production, which owns the deep water rig that exploded last week in the Gulf of Mexico, was cited in 2007 for inadequately training employees in well control, according to the US Minerals Management Service.

The conditions of the training are the same as those suspected in the possible blowout aboard the TransOcean Deepwater Horizon, which left 11 workers missing and presumed dead.

MMS slapped BP with $41,000 in fines in October 2007 after a series of violations related to a near-blowout five years earlier. In November 2002, the Ocean King rig, operated by Diamond Offshore Drilling, in the Gulf had to evacuate all 65 of its workers for nearly two days after operators detected a dangerous rise in gas pressure. The rig, which had been drilling at a depth of more than 5,000 feet, didn’t resume work for nearly a week, according to the MMS report.

Unlike last week’s disaster, workers were able to keep the well from leaking by using cement and mud to plug the well. The same subcontractor, Diamond Offshore, was also used when BP was fined $25,000 in 2004 for bypassing a gas detection system while drilling. A BP spokesman in London says the company still uses Diamond Offshore as a contractor.

... and shares this satellite image:
Looks to me that spill is about the size of NOLA.

One would think that this disaster, following on the heels of the West Virginia coal mine disaster, would suggest some need to review safety procedures in the world of fossil-fuel mining. But no.

Cause and fault

In a decision today (Lopez v. McClellan) reversing summary judgment for the defense in a multi-car accident, the Mississippi Court of Appeals waxes indignant:

We perceive that the problem presented in this case is the use and application of the term “apportioned causation” when the trial court considered whether Lopez had established the necessary element of proximate cause. Causation is not apportioned. However, damages may be apportioned based upon a percentage of fault. It is only in the apportionment of damages that the percentages of fault, i.e. percentage of causation, is to be considered.

* * *

Whether the element of proximate cause has been established in a case is like asking
whether you are a little pregnant. Either the plaintiff has established proximate cause or has not; you either are pregnant or you are not. There is no absolutely no consideration of “apportionment” when the court or a jury considers whether the element of proximate cause has been established.

Now, for such emphatic statements, one might have expected to see a citation to authority. But no.

It's not clear to me that the COA is making a distinction with a difference. Proximate causation is a necessary element in proving negligence, and once it's proved, one is on the hook for some part of the damages -- that part depending on how much one caused the accident. Compare City of Jackson v. Spann, 4 So. 3d 1029 (Miss. 2009):

To recover damages in a negligence suit, a plaintiff must establish that the damage was proximately caused by the negligent act of the defendant(s). Glover v. Jackson State Univ., 968 So. 2d 1267, 1277 (Miss. 2007); Miss. Code Ann. § 85-5-7(1), (5) (Rev. 1999) (fault is allocated only to the party(s) which proximately caused the injury to the plaintiff). * * *

We further find that the circuit court did not fail to address the comparative fault of Jenkins, but simply assigned one hundred percent fault to the City. The circuit court did not set forth specific percentages of fault either to the City or to Jenkins, but clearly held that the Officers were “the proximate cause[ ]” of the accident. By finding only one proximate cause, the circuit court implicitly assigned no fault to Jenkins.

I don't find it helpful to say "Causation is not apportioned." Nor, quite frankly, do I find this discussion at all relevant to the COA's holding in this case -- which is simply that a doctor's testimony that two separate collisions each contributed to a plaintiff's injuries, constitutes admissible evidence, even if he cannot say which collision caused which specific injury.

Dep't of Misguided Demonstrations

In reporting that Mexico's issued a travel advisory to its citizens visiting (lawfully, I'm sure) the state of Arizona, James Joyner notes another dire consequence:

The city of San Francisco, amusingly, is considering a boycott of Arizona as well.

Smooth move. There now should be about 20 states clamoring to enact identical laws to Arizona's.

John Yoo: "Obviously" our waterboarding was torture!

Meant to flag this excellent catch by Emptywheel a few days back, from her study of the OPR documents.

He told us during his interview: “I had actually thought that we prohibited waterboarding. I didn’t recollect that we had actually said that you could do it.” He added:

[T]he waterboarding as it’s described in that memo, is very different than the waterboarding that was described in the press. And when I read the description in the press of what waterboarding is, I was like, oh, well, obviously that would be prohibited by the statute.

As Emptywheel goes on to note, CIA and DOJ disagreed about whether DOJ was kept informed about the details of our waterboarding practice, with DOJ not recalling any such updates. (And waterboarding as described in the Bybee memos remains torture, for reasons widely discussed on the basis of those memos.)

But that's a handy reference for the next time someone tells you we didn't torture KSM or Zubaydah: "really? because John Yoo thinks we did."

Ron Chris Foster v. State

The involvement of former Miss. Supreme Court justice Kay Cobb in the "Tea Party" movement has been raising some eyebrows. Jim Craig, in a comment over at Ipse Blogit, has something good to say:

I have to say that I have great admiration for Kay Cobb; I first met her when she was a State Senator and pushed back against Governor Fordice's attempt to take sentencing in capital cases away from juries.

In the Ron Chris Foster case, she impressively marshalled the evidence that Mr. Foster was mentally retarded in a four-justice dissent in a 4-4 opinion. At the time, Foster was scheduled to be executed. Justice Cobb's independence and judgment was one of the factors that preserved Mr. Foster's appeal (and life) until the US Supreme Court held in a different case that offenders who committed capital crimes before they were 18 could not be executed. If not for Justice Cobb and Governor Musgrove (who entered a temporary reprieve/stay at the same time as the Cobb dissent), Mississippi would have had the dubious distinction of being the last government in the WORLD that executed a juvenile offender.

I'm no fan of the T.E.A. Party movement, and I agree with Matt and NMC that the C of CC is reprehensible. But despite the error of attending the C of CC conference, Kay Cobb is, I think, a high quality and formidable representative of the conservative position in Mississippi.

I can't find a public copy of the Cobb dissent nor find it on Westlaw -- because rehearing was granted, the previous opinion was "disappeared," an unfortunate but common result.

The opinion on rehearing does however state this, which I believe was an important part of the dissent:

The State relies on an IQ test it states was performed at Whitfield in 1990, where Foster was allegedly shown to have an IQ of 80. This test result has been cited by this Court, by the United States District Court, by the United States Court of Appeals, and by Foster himself in pleadings before this Court. At this point the source of this IQ score is a mystery, as it cannot be found in Foster's appeal record.

It's a little spooky to realize that a man's life hung in the balance on the weight of an IQ score that turned out not to even be in the record.

Existentialism, English-style

My dad had a framed copy of this poem for years, without the author. He's got dementia now and couldn't tell me the author if he tried, but it just now occurred to me -- the one who is supposedly in good mental health -- that I could probably google it.

The Laws of God, The Laws of Man

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: Let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;

And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?

Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,

And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?

I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong

And since, my soul, we cannot flee
To Saturn or to Mercury
Keep we must, if keep we can
These foreign laws of God and man.

-- A.E. Housman

Did her degree come with a revocation clause?

Balloon Juice picks up a lovely example of contemporary education:

Kristia Cavere is the Tea Party and a Republican candidate for New York's 19th Congressional District seat held by Hall. Cavere thinks that the Democrats have co-opted Republican values and claims, among other things, that:

"The Republicans are the ones who liberated Europe in World War II."

She continued by saying that the Republicans have always initiated "every" advancement of freedom in our history.

Well, yes, I suppose "freedom" could be defined in some fashion that would make that technically true.

BJ has the malice to compare Cavere's historical creativity with a claim on Cavere's campaign site:

In May 2009, Kristia received a Masters in Science degree in “Defense and Strategic Studies” from Missouri State University, which is located in Fairfax, Virginia right outside our nation’s Capitol. She graduated summa cum laude and with a 4.0 grade point average.

(You also gotta click through for the glamour shots. No, really. Is she running for prom queen or Congress?)

... "Missouri State in Fairfax, VA??" you ask. Yes, the "Department of Defense and Strategic Studies" has its own campus there. With some proud professors, I can see.

Guy Fawkes? Wasn't he in that Wachowski Bros. movie?

Brad DeLong makes a great catch:

Remember, remember the fifth of November: gunpowder, treason and plot.

Remember: Guy Fawkes's goal was to blow up the legislature of the Kingdom of England--the equivalent of crashing a hijacked jetliner into the Capitol while the House and Senate were in session.

Michael Scherer writes about the Republican Governors Organization:

Republican Governors Pay Homage To Guy Fawkes: The Republican Governors Association has embraced the symbolism of Fawkes, launching a rather striking website, RememberNovember.com, with a video that showcases far more Hollywood savvy than one can usually expect from Republicans.... President Obama plays the role of King James, the Democratic leadership is Parliament.... The politics and substance aside, this strikes me as a remarkable bit of political messaging, not just for its cinematic quality. The RGA, under the control of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, is clearly stepping out of the stodgy, safe territory it normally inhabits...

Haley Barbour, pro-terrorist ... when the victims are the Democratic-controlled federal government of the United States. How unsurprising. It's like he's carrying on the Confederate legacy.

Dep't of As Ye Shall Sow

Richard Barrett spent 30-odd years preaching the bestial inferiority of the "black race," so I can't help thinking that he derived some small satisfaction amid his agonizing last moments from the fact that his murderer was a black man.

Vincent McGee, 23, who lives with his parents on the same street as Barrett, was arrested around 5 p.m. Thursday at his sister's home in Pearl, Sheriff Ronnie Pennington said.

Barrett's body had multiple stab wounds to the neck and blunt-force trauma to the head; 35 percent of his body had been burned, Pennington said.

While McGee is African American, authorities have not said Barrett's racial beliefs were a motive in his slaying.

McGee had performed yard work for Barrett, Pennington said.

McGee had served five years of a six-year sentence for simple assault on a police officer and grand larceny when he was released on probation in February from the State Penitentiary at Parchman.

Note to white supremacists: if you make a career out of saying that black people suck, don't hire one to mow your grass.

Unfortunately, McGee has now reaffirmed the prejudices Barrett's fan club shared. Of course, Barrett could've been smitten down in front of Walmart by a four-winged angel with a glowing sword inscribed "HATE TO THE HATERS" in fiery runes, and those folks *still* wouldn't rethink those prejudices. They'd blame Obama.

... More arrests in Barrett's murder, which I think it's over-cautious to avoid calling a "hate crime."

... I can't find anything about his funeral arrangements, but in Madison just now I was passed by a short funeral procession with American Legion motorcyclists, which made me wonder whether that was Barrett's. He was by all accounts a decorated Vietnam veteran, so whatever good one can remember about him, so much the better.

... In an coincidental instance of cosmic balance, the world has also lost Whitney Harris, the last survivor of the American prosecutorial team at Nuremberg:

Whitney Harris, who was a member of the U.S. legal team that prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg after World War II, has died. He was 97.

Harris was the last surviving of the three Nuremberg prosecutors, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said. He died Wednesday at his home in the suburban St. Louis town of Frontenac * * *

Harris was lead prosecutor in the first of the Nuremberg war-crime trials in 1945 and tried Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the senior surviving leader of the Nazi Security Police. He also helped cross-examine Hermann Goering, Hitler's second-in-command, and helped get the confession of Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, head of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

In his later years, Harris was an author and gave speeches on human rights. In 1980, he established the Whitney R. Harris Collection on the Third Reich of Germany at Washington University in St. Louis. He also is the namesake of the university's Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute.

"He basically dedicated his life to trying to develop an international justice system to deal with war crimes against humanity and genocide," said his son, Eugene Harris, 45, of Olivette in suburban St. Louis.

A man who pledged himself to opposing and prosecuting the ideals Barrett stood for.

... Höss's middle name was "Franz Ferdinand"??? (1) Good lord, and (2) why is that in an AP obit?

... Kaltenbrunner's never gotten the press of some other Nazi leaders, which I guess is why I never knew he was president of Interpol. Interpol??? Yes:

Interpol was founded in Austria in 1923 as the International Criminal Police (ICP). Following the Anschluss (Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany) in 1938, the organization fell under the control of Nazi Germany and the Commission's headquarters were eventually moved to Berlin in 1942. It is unclear, however, if and to what extent the ICPC files were used to further the goals of the Nazi regime. However, from 1938 to 1945, the presidents of Interpol included Otto Steinhäusl (a general in the SS), Reinhard Heydrich (a general in the SS, and chair of the Wannsee Conference that appointed Heydrich the chief executor of the "Final solution to the Jewish question"), Arthur Nebe (a general in the SS, and Einsatzgruppen leader, under whose command at least 46,000 people were killed), and Ernst Kaltenbrunner (a general in the SS, the highest ranking SS officer executed after the Nuremberg Trial).

Whoa!

It was Galileo's *tone* that the Church objected to

Jon Chait notices an NRO blogger, Jim Manzi, actually taking on the Right's "epistemic closure" with a criticism of Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny, specifically the part on global warming:

I’m not expert on many topics the book addresses, so I flipped to its treatment of a subject that I’ve spent some time studying — global warming — in order to see how it treated a controversy in which I’m at least familiar with the various viewpoints and some of the technical detail.

It was awful. It was so bad that it was like the proverbial clock that chimes 13 times — not only is it obviously wrong, but it is so wrong that it leads you to question every other piece of information it has ever provided.

And then Manzi goes on to explain why.

As if to illustrate by personal example the whole "epistemic closure" thesis, noted NRO hacks Andrew McCarthy and K.J. Lopez attack Manzi for ... his tone. K-Lo:

There is heart and soul and years of experience in his book — and a heck of a lot more than cut-and-paste Google searching (!). He's heard a lot worse and can handle his own battles, but as one who has followed Mark's career, I found Jim's tone deeply disappointing.

McCarthy:

There will be more to say about this, and I imagine I won't be the only one to discuss it when time allows. But for now I would just observe that Jim Manzi's post on Mark Levin's widely acclaimed book is beneath him. No one minds a good debate, but Jim's gratuitously nasty tone — "awful," "Trilateral Commission," "wingnuttery," etc. — is just breathtaking.

Neither finds anything to object to in Manzi's specific factual criticisms.

Let's see how long Manzi continues to be associated with NRO.

(And yes, I know that it was in fact Galileo's tone, as much as anything else, that got him in trouble.)

... UPDATE: Manzi retorts, off-site.

How many chickens can he trade in for a Mercedes?

Just the other day, I was accusing the GOP of having no ideas for health care reform, but I now stand corrected:

Let's change the system and talk about what the possibilities are. I'm telling you that this works. You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say I'll paint your house. [That's] what people would do to get health care with their doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I'm not backing down from that system.

That's "Sue Lowden (R), the front-running challenger to Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)." Someone give that woman a vice-presidential nomination.