The Ethics of taking risk out of war

War is an inherently unethical pursuit. Even a “just” war involves death on a massive scale. Even if you believe that some people should be killed, the too politely named “collateral damage” kills innocents. But at least in war each side puts its youth at risk. Anyone on a battlefield can die at any minute. The hope has always been that this crushing reality will make political leaders pause for at least a moment before sending their troops out to kill other people.

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Today in Goodness

Two Three quick hits on the goodness trail.
Novelist Jostein Gaarder calls for a Golden Rule 2.0:

(T)he golden rule can no longer just have a horizontal dimension – in other words a “we” and “the others.” We must realize that the Principle of Reciprocity also has a vertical dimension: you shall do to the next generation what you wished the previous generation had done to you.

E.J. Dionne Jr. calls on religious conservatives to stop using virtue as a weapon.

Enough with dividing the world between moral, family-loving Christians and supposedly permissive, corrupt, family-destroying secularists.

Enough with pretending that personal virtue is connected with political creeds. Enough with condemning your adversaries, sometimes viciously, and then insisting upon understanding after the failures of someone on your own side become known to the world. And enough with claiming that support for gay rights and gay marriage is synonymous with opposition to family values and sexual responsibility.

TV critic Maureen Ryan pulls some lessons about good and evil out of the finale of Lost.

• It's never too late. You can always remake your fate (or take a run at resolving your issues in another Sideways life, brutha).
• No one is eternally good or bad. You can revise or redeem your character through your actions.
• No one can go it alone. It takes a village and all that.

And finally... I'll launch my own quest for goodness at my new blog, In Search of Goodness, in just six days.

Kleenex time for same-sex couples in Washington, D.C.

The first same-sex couple has been married in our nation's capital. Time for the tissues and the hankies because who wouldn't feel a tear coming on at such an event?



I also have to admit that hearing the Lord's Prayer and other Christian language at Angelisa Young and Sinjoyla Townsend's wedding goes a long way towards healing my anger at Christianity. It's easy to forget that the religion itself isn't inherently nasty; it's just that some of those who claim to be Christian are.

The Washington Post profiled the happy couple.

Rachel Maddow: Being gay & being an honest journalist isn't a contradiction

The Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, profiles MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and raises the question of whether a lesbian can honestly cover "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The real question is why these issues are never raised about heterosexual journalists. Everyone on this planet has a sexual orientation. Why doesn't anyone ever ask heterosexuals if they can fairly cover LGBT rights?

And so it goes...

Former chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff argues for end to "don't ask, don't tell" ban

Retired Army General John M. Shalikashvili, who chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993 to 1997,writes in the Washington Post today that the DADT ban on lesbians and gays weakens the military.

The officers who oppose lifting the ban argued in The Post that there is "no compelling national security reason" to let openly gay troops serve. They also say, however, that "losses of even a few thousand sergeants, petty officers and experienced mid-grade officers" -- those they believe might bolt -- are unaffordable. Under current policy, we have lost more than 13,000 of those people, such as the Arabic language speaker featured in the new film "Ask Not." In addition, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have found that nearly 4,000 people leave voluntarily each year because of the ban, and that more than 40,000 recruits might join if the ban is ended.

Court sides with Obama Administration & turns down DADT review

As news comes that now even conservatives overwhelmingly support repealing the ban on gays serving openly in the military, the Supreme Court refuses to take a case challenging the constitutionality of the ban. This may actually be a good move, although it's a tad early to tell.

The court was siding with the Obama Administration, which "had urged the justices not to hear the appeal against the policy, even though Obama is on record as opposing it."

The Washington Post reports that Servicemembers Legal Defense Network supports this move. SLDN allegedly is arguing that a separate case now pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is a better test of DADT. That case concerns former Air Force Maj. Margaret Witt.

I'm still mad, damn it

By Nancy Jane Moore

On election day, I drank champagne to celebrate victory at last. On inauguration day I cried a couple of times -- and danced a jig in my living room when Bush took off. At last we had change -- real change.

So a few weeks later, why am I still so pissed off?

I'm not mad at President Obama. I don't agree with everything he's done so far, but the only way I could get a president I completely agreed with would be to get elected to the job myself. And I don't want it.

I voted for Obama because he was very smart and very competent, and had a gift for not just saying the right thing at the right time, but for saying something that challenged our expectations. I also liked his ability to take strong stands without completely alienating his opposition. And it was clear that he was a good politician, that he knew that ideological purity sometimes must be sacrificed to get things done.

So far as president, he's been doing what I expected. I feel like the country is in good hands even when I disagree with his approach.

So again, why am I so pissed off?

It's true that the economic collapse is frightening and just gets worse. After months of being annoyed because no one would use the "R" word -- recession -- I'm now annoyed because they're using it so casually, as if the current situation were similar to the recession in the early 1980s, instead of evidence of a complete breakdown in the world financial system that could lead us into a situation worse than the Great Depression.

And with the exodus of the Bushies, the real problems of climate change are at last getting heard -- and they're even scarier than I expected them to be. I won't even go into the civil liberties issues.

But while those things scare the hell out of me, that's not exactly why I'm so pissed off, either.

I'm mad at the media.

Now I don't say that lightly, because my parents were journalists, and of all the myths associated with professions out there, the one I actually believe in is that the press is the Fourth Estate that keeps us honest. (Even though I spent years as a lawyer, I never fully believed in the adversary system, as most lawyers do.)

For reasons I do not comprehend, most major news outlets -- and I'm thinking of NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post (the only thing I watch on television news is the weather) -- have decided that "balanced" coverage means allowing right wing Republicans to rant against Obama's programs.

To listen to the people who were cheerleaders for and enablers of the Bush debacle accuse Obama and the Democrats of generational theft because they're trying to do what's necessary to get the country back on stable economic ground makes me furious. And when reporters don't even challenge their statements but just allow them to spew nonsense as if that "balanced" a rational explanation of why the government needs to spend money, I start worrying about my blood pressure and switch off the radio.

Those Republicans are the people who actually committed generational theft, the ones who enthusiastically threw money at the Iraq War, who championed corporate tax cuts and allowed the dismantling of regulatory agencies even as Wall Street was careening out of control, and who not only ignored climate change but denied it to the extent that we've made things worse -- much worse -- over the past eight years. We have to spend money now because they threw it away for eight years.

If it didn't make me so mad to listen to them, the irony of it would be hilarious.

But what makes me madder than having to listen to the bankrupt ideas of the people who did so much damage to our country -- and they better be praying that Obama and good luck will save it, or history is going to name them as responsible for the loss of the United States -- is that the only criticism we're getting of the stimulus package or the next installment of the corporate bailout or any other policy proposed by the administration is from the people who got us into this mess.

I'm sure there are legitimate criticisms of the stimulus package -- not just Republican rhetoric or nit picks about funding one particular program or the other. (The nit picks were mostly silly, anyway. What's wrong with re-seeding the National Mall? It is mostly dirt at the moment and needs attention, and that would be a quick program that would provide lots of entry level jobs.)

But we're not getting those kind of criticisms. Oh, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman keeps saying the plan isn't Keynesian enough -- that it doesn't spend enough money. But that's only in his column -- I haven't seem much in the way of a detailed analysis of the stimulus addressing whether it provides enough money anywhere else.

And I'm sure some of the "Chicago Boys" (as Naomi Klein refers to them in The Shock Doctrine) have had the nerve to criticize government spending even when it has become obvious that their belief in unfettered markets is at the heart of the problem.

The thing is, while it's clear that we have to undo the deregulation of the business community that began in the Reagan years -- that is, that we have to re-regulate -- I'd like to hear some intelligent discussion of whether this government spending program is the best way to being fixing the financial collapse. I take Krugman very seriously and I am a great admirer of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but even I suspect that there are good responses out there that do more than regurgitate Keynes. (And it isn't coming from those who scream "free markets" and "tax cuts.")

Good reporters would seek out people with those new ideas. Instead, we're getting coverage of politics that sounds remarkably like coverage of a football game -- second guesses about strategy, name calling -- the kind of reporting that makes me think that political reporters are just sports reporters with pretensions to seriousness. They only care about the game and who wins or loses. That's fine for sports -- that's the point of sports -- but in politics we also care about whether what we're doing works.

And nobody is reporting on the substance.

How are we ever going to solve our problems if the only information we're getting about the key issues of the day is a brief summary of a plan "balanced" by silly rhetoric and an analysis of whether someone's strategy paid off?

Obama fires back

The president has an op-ed in today's Washington Post, firing back at some of the Republican attacks on the stimulus bill. Obama writes:

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis...

This is a good start, and the op-ed is well worth reading. The only problem I have with the column is that it does not directly respond to the Republican charge that stimulus = pork. The people who lead us into this crisis are now squealing that it's the other guys who are pigs. Not so.

Obama or his surrogates need to call this into question over and over again. They need to ask why Republicans think bankers deserve jobs and bailouts, but the people sodding the National Mall don't. In case anyone has forgotten, the House tossed plans to sod the mall out of the stimulus bill because the GOP cried pork.

Obama & Warren On & On: Don't exalt ignorance & hatred

Thank you Richard Cohen! He writes in the Washington Post:

He (Obama) went on to say, "We can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans." Sounds nice.

But what we do not "hold in common" is the dehumanization of homosexuals. What we do not hold in common is the belief that gays are perverts who have chosen their sexual orientation on some sort of whim. What we do not hold in common is the exaltation of ignorance that has led and will lead to discrimination and violence.

Finally, what we do not hold in common is the categorization of a civil rights issue -- the rights of gays to be treated equally -- as some sort of cranky cultural difference. For that we need moral leadership, which, on this occasion, Obama has failed to provide. For some people, that's nothing to celebrate.

E.J. Dionne offers another point of view.

Socialism for the rich only

E.J. Dionne makes some interesting points on the bailout today.

Socialism, you say? We're already into that. The administration's plan amounts to socialism for the rich only.

... and...

(I)f Congress can appropriate $700 billion for Wall Street, where is the help for everyone else hurting in this economy? Isn't it strange that an administration that could not come up with a comparatively modest sum to increase the number of children with health insurance could suddenly find all this cash for the financial industry?

Here's my message to Congress: Do what you must to fix the economy, but be sensible.

Tom Toles: A picture is worth a thousand words

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. Tom Toles sets the record straight. The entire cartoon is available here.

Must Reads: Sarah Palin as president

In case you missed them on Sunday, do go back and read the New York Times and Washington Post stories reporting on Sarah Palin's governing style. Both stories provide a vivid look at how a Sarah Palin presidency might work. It isn't a pretty picture.

Open Letter to Progressives: Let's not let ourselves get "Braziled"

As the Obama-Biden ticket tumbles in the post-convention polls, there is more than a whiff of panic in the air of ProgressiveLand. You can smell it in the blogosphere and in the e-mails, Twitterings and Facebook messages flying around the Internet.

Joan Walsh summed the facts and the feelings up nicely on Salon.com today.

Democrats traumatized by the surreal losses in 2000 and 2004 feel like it's déjà vu all over again, with the sudden surge of John McCain and Sarah Palin in the polls. It's like a bad dream: Even the Obama fundraising juggernaut is stumbling, according to the New York Times, missing its internal targets and having to push harder for cash. Meanwhile, white women have flocked to the ticket with the white female vice president; according to the most recent ABC News poll, Barack Obama had an 8-point lead among white women voters last week; now he's trailing McCain by 12, a 20-point swing in one week.

I'm not writing to say that everything is going to be OK. To do so would be a lie because no one, absolutely no one, knows who is going to win on Nov. 4. Any pollster, any pundit, any beer-drinking buddy from down the street who says that this election is already locked up for John McCain or for Obama is simply a fool.

But I would like to offer some perspective on the psychology of this moment. To understand what may be happening, we have to understand the psychology of competition. Any individual competitor -- or a campaign or political movement -- can defeat itself. Right now, that's what I see as the biggest danger for Obama fans.

To fully explore this idea (and explain my headline), I need to detour into women's soccer. I suspect that Brazil's 1-0 defeat in the gold medal game had more to do with what was going on between the ears of Brazil's players than with what happened on the field.

If you follow the women's game at all, you know that the U.S. once dominated the world (and Brazil), but recently our team has been, at best, a fading power, while the immensely talented Brazil has been ascendant. To make matters worse, our star player, Abby Wambaugh, suffered a broken leg just before the Olympics. Few expected the U.S. to win gold, but we triumphed despite the fact that Brazil played brilliantly for most of the game.

While providing color commentary on the Olympic telecast, former national team star Brandi Chastain offered the best explanation I heard for Brazil's defeat. The U.S. has beaten Brazil so many times in the past that the Brazilians simply couldn't believe that they would win, Chastain said.

Action followed belief.

Reality blossomed out of prophecy.

Today progressives find themselves in the same position as Brazil, except that the stakes are far higher than an Olympic medal.

No one knows what will happen on Nov. 4, but there is one way for progressives to guarantee failure, and that's to remain convinced that we can't win.

For more perspective -- some cheerful and some not -- see these links.

A Democratic pollster puts the latest polls in perspective.

Jonathon Capehart from The Washington Post considers the situation.

CNN does a poll of polls and considers the electoral map.

Politics as Thumb-sucking: Obama can't win because he lives in the real world

By Diane Silver

I'm scared to death that Sally Quinn is right. What's even more frightening is the fact that our problems will never be solved -- in this country or the world -- until we can all be adult enough to actually face reality.

Once more Sebelius is named as a possible vice president

By Diane Silver

The Washington Posts today listed Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as one of nine possible vice presidential candidates.

I'm going to sound terribly cynical, but I don't see this as very likely. If nominated, Barack Obama may well need to shore up the white male vote and chose accordingly. Hillary Clinton would need to pick a male running mate for similar reasons of touchiness, prejudice and balance. John Edwards is Sebelius' best bet for getting the number two spot, and Edwards' star is decidedly dimming.

Please note that I'm not saying that such touchiness / prejudice / political balance are right, only that they're factors candidates will likely consider as they mull over a running mate.

New Hampshire: The Jerk Factor, Hillary, Big Media & more

By Diane Silver

All of the above and more are among the thoughts clogging the cyberways on this day after New Hampshire tossed the presidential race up in the air. And yes, I'm focusing on the Democratic race.

Here are some of the most interesting bits of the post-primary analysis.

What went wrong with the polls?

Big media pundits miss the point.

The coverage had been so out of control there was speculation about when Hillary might have to drop out. Polls giving Barack Obama an 8- or 10-point lead were accepted as fact.

Another Comeback Kid

Presidential campaigns rarely end this quickly, and it was as if the voters of New Hampshire on Tuesday were divided enough in their choice of candidates to assure that voters elsewhere will have the opportunity to settle the issue.

"I think it's awfully interesting that they made her the underdog and she came back," said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick. "Obviously, a lot of these voters don't want to close down the process. It's like, 'Wait a minute.' "

Rimjob at Daily Kos looks at the whole enchilada. Kos, himself, cites the Jerk Factor in helping to give Hillary the win.

Josh Marshall looks for meaning.

My personal favorite comes from Kevin Drum.

There's now a pretty good chance that, for the first time in my life, my vote in a Democratic primary will actually be meaningful. And it only took 30 years!

Hey, I'm in the same situation. The Feb. 5 Democratic caucuses in Kansas might actually mean something. What a hoot!

And a little pre-NH vote analysis of what is now known as "The Moment."

Guys may cry, after all, but tears, culturally, are a Female Thing. And the word ‘emotional’ is rarely used as flattery. (See John Edwards, who responded to a reporter’s question about The Moment with this: “I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve.”)...

The press’s simultaneous amplification and shorthanding of Clinton’s display of emotion support (Gloria) Steinem’s point (in the New York Times): Clinton’s gender, in a still-sometimes-sexist society like ours, may be more problematic than we allow ourselves to acknowledge or believe.

Fighting less & winning more

By Diane Silver

Nathaniel Fick, a former Marine captain, provides perspective today of why a new approach to terrorism is key, and how the kill-them-all strategy can't keep us safe.

In a Washington Post column, Fick talks about his experience teaching counterinsurgency tactics in Afghanistan. One of his key points is that fighting less, leads to winning more. Fick writes:

(O)ne of my many gratifying moments at the academy came at the start of a class on targeting. I told the students to list the top three targets they would aim for if they were leading forces in Zabul province, a Taliban stronghold. When I asked a U.S. officer to share his list, he rattled off the names of three senior Taliban leaders to be captured or killed. Then I turned and asked an Afghan officer the same question. "First we must target the local councils to see how we can best help them," he replied. "Then we must target the local mullahs to find out their needs and let them know we respect their authority." Exactly. In counterinsurgency warfare, targeting is more about whom you bring in than whom you take out.

It's a column well worth reading. In it, Fick provides a very real-world example of how what Carla Goldstein calls "spiritual activism" can work.

Good news or bad news? Supreme Court agrees to hear Gitmo detainee case

By Diane Silver

Normally I'd be thrilled by the news that the U.S. Supreme Court will review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees can go before federal courts. Normally I'd be just as giddy as Professor Eric Freedman. The Washington Post reports:

"This is a stunning victory for the detainees," said Eric M. Freedman, professor of constitutional law at Hofstra Law School, who has been advising the detainees. "It goes well beyond what we asked for, and clearly indicates the unease up there" at the Supreme Court.

But this is the George W. Bush packed court. As my co-blogger Nancy Jane Moore has noted repeatedly, these aren't folks who have been very friendly to ideas that are any more recent than the 17th Century.

Of course, the really good news is that if this very conservative court strikes down the Bushie approach to locking detainees away and throwing out the key, then George W. and friends are truly up the creek without a paddle.

Stay tuned for more thrilling episodes of "George W. vs. The Constitution."

By the way, the cases the Supremes are taking up are are Boumediene v. Bush, 06-1195, and Al Odah v. U.S., 06-1196.

The politicalization of the Justice Department's civil rights unit keeps going and going...

By Diane Silver

The news just keeps getting better and better (note sarcasm) about Bradley Schlozman, who briefly served as U.S. Attorney in Kansas City.

During his tenure as head of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, Schlozman hired and fired based on political affiliation, and apparently just being a Republican wasn't enough. Experience and competence also seem to have meant little.

The Washington Post has the story. Watching Those We Chose follows up. As always the most up-to-date information on the continuing saga of the DOJ is Talking Points Memo.

Congress could use new GAO report to take legal action against Bush

By Diane Silver

You have to get through the entire Washington Post story to get to the point, but it's there and it's clear: George W. Bush is using signing statements to set himself up above the law, and that has legal consequences for Bush and the nation.

In the second to the last paragraph of the story, The Post reports that at least one legal expert believes a just-released General Accounting Office report provides the evidence Congress needs to "take collective legal action against the White House."

The Post reports:

(T)he GAO's findings are legally significant, said Bruce Fein, a conservative constitutional lawyer who served on an American Bar Association task force that excoriated the president's use of signing statements in a report last year. White House officials have dismissed such concerns as overblown, suggesting that the statements were staking out legal positions, not broadcasting the administration's intentions.

But the GAO report suggests that the dispute over signing statements is not an academic one, Fein said, adding that Congress could use the report to take collective legal action against the White House.

"At least it makes clear the signing statements aren't solely for staking out a legal position, with the president just saying, 'I don't have to do these things, but I will,' " Fein said. "In fact they are not doing some of these things. You can't just vaporize it as an academic question."

Alternet has a good explanation of the signing statements controversy and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's role in providing legal cover for Bush.

Personally, I've never been able to understand how Bush or any president can justify ignoring Congress. The president has the power to veto, but this president ignores that Constitutional remedy for any disagreement with Congress and simply declares himself above the law.

If Bush and company are allowed to get away with ignoring the law, the Constitution will be weakened, and we will be paying the price far into the future.