Historically literate Americans will find something alarming in this headline:
Gov.: New Orleans crime calls for military presence
This, of course, would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which, among other things, prohibits troops under Federal control from fighting crime on American soil, unless a special provision is made by Congress for such.
National Guard troops who are under the authority of a Governor, however, can be an adjunct to the civilian police force.
The Agitator has a great post about a 9/11 victim named John Perry, a NYPD officer filling out his retirement papers when the first plane struck:
Perry was at a police station near ground zero filling his retirement papers when he first heard news that a plane had hit one of the Trade Center towers. He immediately asked for his badge back, ran into an old captain on his way to the towers, and the two of them began assisting in evaucating the building. One report I read indicated he was the only off-duty officer killed on September 11. Perry was apparently assisting a woman who had fainted when the south tower collapsed. That's the last time he was seen alive.There's a scholarship set up in Perry's name that seems particularly appropriate. The money goes to promising students affected by the insidious provision added to the 1998 Higher Education Act by drug war champion Rep. Mark Souder. Souder's amendment forbids federal aid to any student convicted of a drug offense. It's a policy that seems to fly in the face everything Perry stood for -- it inhibits the pursuit of knowledge and education, it's an unforgiving and draconian punishment for victimless crimes, and it's aimed squarely at kids who are attempting to move on from past mistakes. It's also a private, civil society solution to a stupid government policy.
If there is one thing more insidious than religion, it is the drug war.
The only thing I ask of the religious, on this day that witnessed evil perpetrated by man in the name of religion, is that they consider the depths to which religion can sink man.
One of the reasons I refer to myself as libertarian-ish as opposed to plain old libertarian is that there are some uses of government power about which I don't get too exercised; among them, most obviously, is the death penalty.
Another argument for which I have little sympathy is the notion that the government ought not be spying on international communications without warrant.
I don't pretend any expertise in the area, however, and therefore, my opinion on it hardly amounts to the veritable hill of beans.
But. There are a lot of people who are knowledgeable about the issue, and the legal problems surrounding it. None of them are too happy with the legal analysis put forth by the peanut-farmer appointee, Anna Diggs Taylor:
The main problems, scholars sympathetic to the decision’s bottom line said, is that the judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, relied on novel and questionable constitutional arguments when more straightforward statutory ones were available.She ruled, for instance, that the program, which eavesdrops without court permission on international communications of people in the United States, violated the First Amendment because it might have chilled the speech of people who feared they might have been monitored.
I don't pretend to know one way or the other whether this woman's reasoning was competent, incomeptent, or merely inflamed by passion, as some have argued. What I do know is this: the New York Times doesn't get it:
Judge Taylor also ruled that the program violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. But scholars said she failed to take account of the so-called “special needs” exception to the amendment’s requirement that the government obtain a warrant before engaging in some surveillance unrelated to routine law enforcement. “It’s just a few pages of general ruminations about the Fourth Amendment, much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect,” Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University who believes the administration’s legal justifications for the program are weak, said of Judge Taylor’s Fourth Amendment analysis on a Web log called the Volokh Conspiracy.
Where's the problem in that quote, you ask? Go to the source: click on the link I give you, above, and see if there is any link to Kerr's blog post.
What's that? There's no link? In the Times' lame attempt at "analysis" it fails to link to the sources on which it bases its analysis? That gets me more exercised than this warrantless wiretapping bullshit.
How stupid is the New York Times?
Link to the ludicrousness that passes for the Times today via Althouse, natch.
UPDATE: I would also add that it appears at least some commenters at Althouse's blog don't understand how newspapers work; they feign surprise and indignation at the fact that the Times' editorial board can be pro-Diggs and, at the same time, report on blawgers who trash the opinion. Talk about not understanding how journalism works. Ignorance on either side of the issue does little to inform debate, no more so than does the Times' resolute refusal to link to those blogs it considers relevant to its reporting.
Cluelessness abounds.
If anyone needs a reminder of the depths to which religion can sink man, read this discussion of a group of survivors of 9/11 reminiscing about their experiences.
Then, consider the mantra: the only thing I ask of the religious is that they consider the depths to which religion has sunk man.
Then, go read Becker:
Objectors to profiling of particular groups complain that this would subject many innocent members of groups being profiled to obtrusive and sometimes embarrassing searches and even harassment. No question that profiling of a group inevitably means that innocent members of that group would experience greater delays and more unpleasant encounters than would innocent members of groups not profiled. This is regrettable, but there is no effective alternative to profiling when one or a few groups pose far greater threats than do the rest of the population. To limit the discomfort and anger caused by profiling, members of the profiled groups should be treated politely and with dignity. They should also be reminded that they too are being protected from terrorist activities by a small fringe.Those objecting to profiling potential terrorists usually want to subject everyone to the same detailed examination and inquiry. However, when potential terrorists are part of a group that constitutes only a small fraction of the population, searching everyone with the same detailed care at airports or at other venues would be needlessly costly and time consuming. This would slow down and thereby reduce air travel and other vulnerable group activities. It would also lead to loud complaints by those affected after the fear of terrorism had abated.
People in the United States and other free countries are gradually realizing that effective conduct of the war on terrorism means that it is no longer possible to have the full complement of liberties they have been accustomed to. Terrorists and suspected terrorists may be subjected to psychological pressures in order to gain vital information, pressures that would not have been acceptable in the past. In addition, government anti-terror agencies will be listening in on some phone conversations, they will inspect some emails, they will check some spending and bank accounts, they will monitor travel, and in other ways too they will intrude on traditional liberties. Of course, profiled groups, including innocent members, would be subject to more extensive surveillance than others. Unfortunately, mistakes will continue to be made, as in the detention by Britain a few months ago of some Muslim men who turned out to be innocent.
There are two enemies in our fight against terrorism: (1) religion and (2) the naive, sentimental, and ignorant belief that all men are created equal.
Posner appears to advocate the radical idea that we--the West--are at war with Islam:
Our ostrich brgade may retreat to the claim that "our" Muslims, unlike the British and Canadian Muslims, are fully integrated into American society and so pose no threat. That is false. The percentage of American Muslims who are potential terrorists is undoubtedly smaller than the corresponding percentages in either Britain or Canada. But as there are many more American Muslims than there are British or Canadian ones, and as (we now know) British (and presumably Canadian) Muslim extremists want to attack us and not just their own host nations, we cannot afford to assume that we are safe. Perhaps we shall no longer indulge that dangerous assumption.
Posner is correct. We are at war with an enemy that hides behind the guise of religiosity and piety; politically correct appeals to multiculturalism will not help us vanquish this enemy.
Kill religion. Elevate man.
Mantra: The only thing I ask of the religious is that they consider the depths to which religion has sunk man.
Wow.
Are they intentionally trying to destroy what remains of MSM credibility?
What beggars belief here is that Retuers thinks it could get away with something like this, in the age of the blogosphere.
Reuters' CEO is Tom Glocer. He must be sweating bullets now.
David Bernstein at Volokh asks an interesting question:
[L]et's say you are an Israeli officer in charge of taking out the Party of God commanders in question. Your analysis shows that a bomb is 90% likely to be effective, as is a commando raid. Expected losses from an air attack to your forces are zero. Expected losses from the commando raid are two killed, eight wounded. The only reason to prefer the commando raid is to avoid civilian casualties (this may not be true in this particular case, but play along). How many civilian casualties do you need to avoid to justify the deaths and injuries of your own men? What if five civilians live in the building and would likely die from the raid? Ten? Fifty? One hundred?
To which one commenter responds, without warrant:
The value of human life is infinite. Which means, not that it's big (it's not), but that you can't calculate with it.
The value of human life is not "infinite": were it so, there would be no actuarial science and no life insurance industry. Bernstein asks an interesting and important question; muddying the waters with sentimental appeals to the "infinite value" of a human life doesn't answer the question.
Interesting analysis of why public criticism of Israel's military endeavors by Americans has been rather muted:
First, the U.S. itself now is directly engaged in its own war on terrorism. That has produced more sympathy for Israel, which is seen as the ultimate target of many Islamic and Palestinian terror groups. And while there also is a great deal of sympathy for the Lebanese government, Americans now are more likely to share Israel's desire to bust up the Islamic militants of Hezbollah, who form a kind of state within a state in Lebanon.Second, Israel has helped itself by having unilaterally pulled its troops out of southern Lebanon and Gaza in recent years. That has bolstered the feeling among Americans that it has taken steps for its part to end the confrontation with Arabs around it. Never mind that critics see the withdrawals as a way for Israel to impose its version of peace unilaterally.
Third, Israel benefits in American eyes because it was seen as having tried to offer a mutually acceptable negotiated peace to Palestinians in the waning days of the Clinton administration, in peace talks at Camp David. And the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is seen as being the one who rejected it.
Finally, though it's little discussed, Christian conservatives, a powerful constituency within Mr. Bush's Republican party, have become a potent pro-Israel force on the political front in recent years. That matters to this White House.
Critics fear the president and his team are too supportive of Israel to have much effect brokering an end to the violence. But if the president's instinctive reaction is to support Israel, the public reaction at home isn't doing much to force him to alter it.
A man with a pistol stops a person with a knife.
Think gun control is a good idea?
What if any of the victims of this guy had had guns with which to protect themselves?
Bromide: outlaw guns and only outlaws have guns.
So the President is pandering to scientific illiterates (i.e., the religious) in vetoing the Senate's stem cell bill.
I don't see the BFD: no scientist is claiming it is impossible to get funding; polls show most Americans support the research; the action paints the religious as clueless morons.
Whoever figures out stem cells will have a billion dollar business on his hands; the highest moral good is to create wealth. The second highest moral good is to save lives.
Stem cells are not "lives." People with, say, Alzheimer's are lives. But the religious don't seem to care about that.
A professor from the University of Haifa argues that the Lebanese have only themselves to blame for electing Hezbollah thugs to government:
And here is a sad, third clearheaded point: Democracy, in the Middle East as elsewhere, is not just about universal suffrage. The Palestinians brought Hamas to power, and Hezbollah is a coalition partner in the Lebanese government. Please reflect on this, dear Western lovers of democracy: Is majority vote truly the sole gist of it all? Here is a painful truth: Israel is killing civilians -- inadvertently, though arguably too freely -- as it targets militants in Gaza and Lebanon. Yet the hair-raising aspect of it is that many of those civilians voted Hamas, and some voted Hezbollah, into their own governments. Democratically elected, these groups care little for the lives of their own citizens, even less for the Israeli Arabs they have bombed and killed in recent days, and null for Israeli civilians. Yet their voters keep applauding. Gazan and Lebanese children are innocent victims of this policy, and many Israelis -- I must assert this even in the face of disbelief -- truly grieve for them.
Michael Totten argues, ignorantly:
I sympathize one hundred percent with what Israel is trying to do here. But they aren't going about it the right way, and they're punishing far too many of the wrong people. Lord knows I could be wrong, and the situation is rapidly changing, but at this particular moment it looks bad for Israel, bad for Lebanon, bad for the United States, good for Syria, and good for Iran.There is no alternate universe where the Lebanese government could have disarmed an Iranian-trained terrorist/guerilla militia that even the Israelis could not defeat in years of grinding war. There is no alternate universe where it was in Lebanon's interest to restart the civil war on Israel's behalf, to burn down their country all over again right at the moment where they finally had hope after 30 years of convulsive conflict and Baath Party overlordship.
The Lebanese government should have asked for more help from the international community. The Lebanese government should have been far less reactionary in its attitude toward the Israelis. They made more mistakes than just two, but I'd say these are the principal ones.
What should the Israelis have done instead? They should have treated Hezbollahland as a country, which it basically is, and attacked it. They should have treated Lebanon as a separate country, which it basically is, and left it alone. Mainstream Lebanese have no problem when Israel hammers Hezbollah in its little enclave. Somebody has to do it, and it cannot be them. If you want to embolden Lebanese to work with Israelis against Hezbollah, or at least move in to Hezbollah's bombed out positions, don't attack all of Lebanon.
Except, "Hezbollahland" is not a separate country any more than Taliban-occupied Afghanistan was a separate country, or Nazi-occupied France was a separate country. Lebanon is a sovereign nation and its failure to reign in its domestic terrorists is the fault of all its people; they are not, unfortunately, therefore immune to Israeli airstrikes. To the extent that the Lebanese government has failed to quell the influence of radical Islam in its midst, it is a legitimate military target, as is Kabul, Tehran, etc.
It may well be that most Lebanese are pro-west and friendly toward Israel (the few Lebanese people I have met have been avowedly western and secular in their outlook). But it does not follow from any of this that Lebanon is therefore immune from Israeli airstrikes. Consider a hypothetical situation in which a group of terrorists based in Toronto started lobbing missiles at Detroit (admittedly, Detroit has few targets of any value*, so such attacks would be more symbolic than anything). Were Canada to fail to reign in its missile throwing terrorists, would anyone doubt America's right to raid Toronto and bomb it into submission? Only the ignorant and morally capricious would argue that America had no right to defend itself. Only the stupid would claim that America should "isolate" "terrorist Toronto" from civilian Toronto (how the hell do you make that distinction?)
*Note: Ford and GM plants and headquarters are emphatically not "valuable" targets.
Maybe Riyadh is coming to its senses.
According to this article, the various Arab nations met in Cairo. Predictably they are calling on the ever-impotent UN to do something about the Israel-Hezbolla conflict, but Saudia Arabia pulls no punches in placing blame on Hezbollah:
Arab foreign ministers, meeting in Cairo, adopted a resolution calling for U.N. Security Council intervention. But moderates led by Saudi Arabia, bickering with Syria and other backers of Hezbollah, denounced the Lebanese guerrilla group's actions in provoking the latest conflict.
Frankly I find that rather stunning and can't quite trust it. Because, of course, it is true that Hezbollah has provoked the most recent conflict.
Michael Totten, who has reported extensively from Beirut (and other places in the Middle East) over the past several months, has posts here and here.
Also, though I can't find a link for it, there is a pro-Israel rally at the UN at 12PM on Monday June 17th.
No, this is not about Jerusalem getting wise and dropping a nuke on Tehran (though that would be a good thing).
It is, rather, about the New York Times Magazine cover article:
The Nuclear OptionNuclear power could help combat global warming. It could lessen our dependence on air-polluting fossil fuels. But will it ever be...not scary?
Ignore for a moment the blather about global warming, which, as I have explained, repeatedly, is not necessarily a real occurrence.
The paper of record for liberals evidently sees the advantages of nuclear power. Let's nuke this country.
Information on pebble bed reactors here.
Information from the Nuclear Energy Institute on safety and regulatory issues here.
The only good environmentalist is a nuked environmentalist.
So, you want to kill a kid and dismember him, but not be sentenced to death or life without parole? How does a mere 45 years in prison sound for murder?
Those that fail to condemn murderers to death have only themselves to blame for the money wasted on murderers' sustenance.
I'm surprised that this story has not garnered more attention:
The State Department is recovering from large-scale computer break-ins worldwide over the past several weeks that appeared to target its headquarters and offices dealing with China and North Korea, The Associated Press has learned.Investigators believe hackers stole sensitive U.S. information and passwords and implanted backdoors in unclassified government computers to allow them to return at will, said U.S. officials familiar with the hacking.
This is, in a word, unacceptable. What kind of third-rate bureaucracy leaves their network vulnerable to computer hackers?
Heads should roll; they won't.
Information security needs to be integrated into every government agency at their highest levels, just as corporations need to have their security heads report directly the CEO. My guess is that companies have long since rejiggered the reporting lines between their security chiefs and their CEOs. Government agencies evidently have not.
Do you trust this government to respond well to terrorist attacks when it can't even guarantee the sanctity of its communications infrastructure?
An email to an advocate of the idea that man causes global warming, and that such is occurring:
Another point about global warming which bears mentioning, and which is utterly absent from most advocates' arguments is this:Assume global warming is (1) occurring, and (2) it is occurring due to human use of carbon-based fuels.
How the hell does an anti-global warming platform plan to persuade the 2 billion people in India and China to refrain from using carbon fuels over the next century? It is very easy for the more reasonable environmentalists to insist that Europe and America invest in nuclear power--all things being equal, even in the absence of global warming, nuclear power is a good strategic idea, if only to stick it to Chavez and Mohammed.
But the enviros insist on reducing carbon use without considering how that will happen in the two quickest growing large economies in the world. Reducing America and Europe's reliance on oil will achieve nothing if it is not met with a similar effort in India and China. No one has proposed how to get those countries, which are desperate to catch up to Western standards of development and wealth, to wean themselves from oil. Recall that developing a national infrastructure of nuclear power over a country the size of either India or China costs tens of billions in capital--capital which is likely better spent, in the view of their leaders, on education, attracting foreign investment, and promoting their countries to the rest of the world. It is one thing to argue that the world's two $12 trillion economies--America and the E.U.--should invest tens of billions in nuclear power to meet future energy needs. It is quite another to argue that India and China each commit a similar chunk of change to national network of nuclear power stations.
It's possible to argue that, with the advent of widespread adoption of nuclear power in America and Europe, the costs associated with building new nuclear power plants and bringing them online will drop over the decades, and, at such point, other nuclear power plants could be deployed relatively cheaply throughout the world. But that is a wildly impossible thing to predict, and basing an energy policy on such an inherently unknowable thing as the future costs associated with building nuclear power plants is a rather stupid way to conceive of energy policy.
As with most such proponents, this person resolutely refuses to consider the economic issues surrounding the idea of reducing use carbon-based fuels.
The news reports coming out of Miami about the alleged terrorist cell bear an uncanny resemblance to Showtimes' series Sleeper Cell, in which a group of all-American immigrants comprise a sleeper cell of terrorists waiting to strike in Los Angeles. For what it's worth, the show has its characters refer to each other as "brother" and these idiots seem to have referred to themselves as "brother" as well, in some pathetic attempt at homocidal fraternity.
Let's hope the government prosecutes them and executes them. Or at the very least send them to jail for life.
One could say that it is rather pathetic to get one's inspiration from television.
Why would sexual predators obey laws? Further, why would victims of sexual predation be less victimized if they were older rather than younger?
Those are the questions that one asks when one considers the reasons given for Canada's movement to raise its age of consent from 14 to 16:
Justice Minister Vic Toews said changing the law will bring Canada's standards into line with those in several other countries, and he complained Canada's relatively low age of consent has attracted sexual criminals from more restrictive countries.
This is like arguing that drinking ages deter drunks from drinking until, well, they're old enough to...drink.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian, writes in the most recent issue of Forbes:
Russia, a nearly third-rate economic power a decade ago, has leapt back into the race through its large-scale export of natural gas and oil. The U.S. could consolidate its superpower status with a Global Nuclear Energy Supply System, which, in time, would not only solve the world's energy problems but would also generate unimaginably vast export earnings, thereby providing a permanent solution to America's balance-of-payments deficit.It's worth remembering that the U.S. has not entirely ne-glected the potential of large-scale use of nuclear energy. Its fleets of aircraft carriers and submarines, which form the core of its capacity as the world's only superpower and are the means of making its global military outreach a reality, are almost entirely powered by nuclear reactors. These have performed over many decades with spectacular efficiency and superb safety records.
It's already clear that the U.S. will have to take to the nuclear road again. I hope that President Bush and Congress will have the intellectual gallantry and long-term willpower to do so on a gigantic scale, one that will once again put the U.S. a generation ahead of others in what is perhaps the single most important field of economic activity.
Given a decisive lead from the White House and Capitol Hill, the American people can be trusted to respond with energy and enthusiasm.
I agree. Kill the environmentalists.
Anyone who wonders why journalists aren't very often taken seriously would do well to read Dobbs' latest screed on immigration, illegal and otherwise:
"The will of the people," Thomas Jefferson said, "is the only legitimate foundation of any government." But if President Bush and the Senate prevail, it will be a clear victory for corporate supremacists, advocacy groups and dominant special interests and a historical defeat for our middle-class working men and women and their families.
To repeat the obvious: the economy is not a zero sum game with a fixed number of jobs available. Rather as the economy grows so do the amount of jobs. If America's "middle class families" can't find employment, well, then that suggests they need to educate themselves and hone skills which are in demand.
Dobbs is worse than Darryl Hannah.
Here's a question: what is the greater public health problem, exposing kids to cigarette smoke from their parents' cigarettes or the violence attendant in black markets?
Those who want to outlaw cigarettes, often under the rubric of kids' health, fail to consider the negative effects of outlawing things: those things become more valuable, and therefore, more profitable, than when they were legal. Consequently, black markets for those products appear, violence and criminal activity (i.e., trafficking) occurs, and, well, the public health effects of criminalization far outweigh the public health effects of asthmatic kids.
I mention this because an irresponsible doctor, writing in the Wall St. Journal claims, ignorantly:
We have emissions standards for automobiles but we don't have clean-air quality standards for the air that children breathe.As much as I'd like to see it, I don't expect anyone to outlaw cigarettes or tax them out of existence anytime soon.
If we had the courage to do that, I'd be making fewer late-night trips to the emergency department and my littlest patients would be breathing easier.
Of course, when it's about the kids, the first reaction is: do anything to protect them. But "doing anytihng" often has adverse negative consequences, as we have seen both during Prohibition and the current drug war.
He's the head of the United Auto Workers Union
He claims, correctly:
United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said the decline of the Big Three auto makers and the rise of their Japanese competitors means the union must accept big changes in its approach to health insurance and other contract issues.Mr. Gettelfinger made the comment Monday in a report to the UAW's constitutional convention, which was opening in Las Vegas.
The challenges facing General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group are greater than earlier crises, including Chrysler's escape from bankruptcy in the 1970s, the recession of the early 1980s and GM's record losses in 1992, Mr. Gettelfinger said.
[Ron Gettelfinger]"The challenges we face aren't the kind that can be ridden out. They're structural challenges, and they require new and farsighted solutions," he said.
Among those challenges is that nonunion U.S.-based auto assembly plants made 1.1 million more vehicles in 2005 than they did in 2001, while production at unionized plants fell by 1.1 million, he said. Mr. Gettelfinger said U.S. labor laws heavily favor management and allow employers, such as Japanese auto makers that have opened plants in this country, to intimidate workers seeking to unionize.
All well and good. Labor laws, properly, favor management over employees because, well, management operates at the behest of owners, not employees.
But then he blames Detroit's probalem solely on management:
Mr. Gettelfinger said company executives share responsibility for the problems faced by the Big Three and by auto parts suppliers such as Delphi Corp., GM's former parts division that now is under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection."Dig into the reasons behind this, and there's no getting away from the fact that bad management decisions have played a role," Mr. Gettelfinger said. "Missed market opportunities. Bland designs. Money that could have been invested in new products and plant improvements squandered in ill-conceived international ventures."
Mr. Gettelfinger said the U.S. health care system "imposes an unfair burden on older, established employers' such as the Big Three. He called for universal health care to level the playing field between U.S. and foreign automakers, which do not yet have significant retiree health costs.
Today, the relatively generous health care benefits that unionized autoworkers get are "unsustainable" in the face of declining Big Three sales, he said. Mr. Gettelfinger defended the union's decision to accept benefit cuts in talks with automakers this year.
"We can be proud that our union doesn't shy away from making tough calls and even prouder of our members" willingness to make sacrifices for those who preceded them and those who will follow," he said.
The unions tied Detroit's hands through their collective bargaining demands. Japan merely exploited an opportunity, just as Google has decimated newspapers' local advertising business by exploiting an opportunity. Laying the blame for American auto manufactuers' demise at the hands of management is akin to blaming parents for the woeful education their kids receive.
Kill unions. Create wealth.
More thoughts at The Liberal Order.
The Economist reports on the state of gay marriage in Canada and other places. As always, the Catholic Church isn't made to look especially good:
Federalism has also been trumped in another country trying to come to grips with the issue. Australia’s federal government under its prime minister, John Howard, had passed legislation limiting marriage to that between a man and a woman. But the Australian Capital Territory (in effect, Canberra, the capital) recently passed a law that stated: “a civil union is different to a marriage but is to be treated for all purposes under territory law in the same way as a marriage”" Seeing a bid to allow gay marriage with a linguistic trick, Mr Howard said on Tuesday June 6th that the government would nullify Canberra’s move. Four days earlier Stephen Harper, Canada's Conservative leader, said that he would give MPs a free vote on whether to re-examine a law giving gays the right to marry in that country.Western countries are divided on the issue. South Africa, Canada, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands allow full gay marriage, and many countries in Europe have recognised rights enshrined in civil partnerships. The United Kingdom last year, for example, granted gay couples extensive rights of inheritance, tax benefits and more. But Pope Benedict XVI fears an assault on traditional marriage, not least in Catholic countries like Spain and Belgium. Even in Italy the government is looking at creating some sort of nationwide rights for gay couples. On Tuesday the Pope said he worried that there is an “eclipse of God” happening in places where gay marriage, artificial insemination and the like replace traditional nuclear families and procreation.
But giving gay couples the chance to inherit, to share workplace benefits, receive hospital visits and enjoy other mundane but important rights that heterosexual couples take for granted should not cause great alarm in democracies. Even in America the popularity of gay marriage and civil unions is now beginning to rise. Some may fight to stop it being called marriage, but, despite this week's grumbling, the trend seems to be in the direction of giving gay couples nearly everything but that magic word.
NOTE: This post originally was intended to be a post about doing business in China, but it seems to have evolved into a more general discussion of the P.R. problems that China, Yahoo!, and the Catholic Church are getting themselves into by, well, engaging with one another. All in all, a very odd dynamic.
And away we go!
In related news, Terry Semel, Yahoo's clueless chief responded thusly to a hypothetical question:
Terry Semel was being interviewed at the D Conference. I was in the audience. The subject was censorship in China and Yahoo!'s willingness to look the other way in order to do business there. Semel stated Yahoo!'s position that it was better to engage with China and push them at every opportunity to become more open than to leave the country entirely. It was a good position, in my opinion, and he made it well.But then someone from the audience got up and asked a question. The question was what would Yahoo!'s position be if it was the Nazi Germany and Hitler instead of China. Semel said something to the effect that "I wasn't even alive then, I don't honestly know what we would do".
Wrong answer. As Joe at Techdirt explains, when Hitler [and] the Nazis come up, the best thing to do is end the discussion. Semel was clearly annoyed with the question but he should have refused the answer it instead of saying anything.
...
This brings me to a larger point. Running a technology company in the Internet age requires a lot more political skills than it used to. The Internet is way more than a technology and companies that participate in its commercial development are in the political space as much as the tech space.
Two observations are quite clear to me:
(1) Companies that do business in China need to contend with the fact the Chinese governmnet is a Communist government and is therefore neither respectful of human rights nor moral.(2) Companies that do business in China can ill afford to have as the head of their companies people who respond to questions as Semel did.
Companies, as I have argued before, are in the business of risk mitigation. Companies have communications and P.R. departments precisely so that they can mitigate risks; for Semel not to anticipate such a question as that posed is evidence that he is not fit to lead the company. Semel should be canned; Yahoo can't afford the bad publicity it gets.
This is how Semel's response plays out in the press, whether it is an accurate depiction or not.
Can the fool.
Finally, from the pot calling the kettle black department, the Catholic Church is calling for a full inquiry into Tiananmen Square, despite never having conducted a full accounting of its priests predilection for young boys:
The highest official of the Roman Catholic church in China marked the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square killings today by strongly criticizing the Chinese government and calling on it to hold a full and open review of the killings.The criticism by Cardinal Joseph Zen is the latest sign that the Vatican may not be willing to compromise on human rights in order to establish diplomatic relations with mainland China.
So, the Catholic Church is not willing to "compromise" on human rights but when it comes to compromising its parishioners own bodies, well, the Church really doesn't seem to care.
Neither China, Yahoo, nor the Catholic Church looks good right now.
Any bets on the next P.R. gaffe?
I bet Senator Clinton will say something stupid in the coming months. That's where my money is.
Two observations:
1) Sentencing Lay and Skilling to life seems to equate their crimes with those of murder and treason. That seems ludicrous.2) Regarding those who lost "everything" in the wake of the Enron bankruptcy: financial prudence suggests that one's assets be diversified. Why should Skilling and Lay be punished for people's failure to properly manage their assets?
The obvious rejoinder to point #2 is "Lay and Skilling lied to their employees about the health of their company" but this is entirely unconvincing. No company is so immune from the vagaries of competiton or other unpredictable events that its financial health is reason to have all of one's eggs in one basket.
Finally, doubtless someone will read my comments and reply "well, that is not how the law works." Of course, I care little how "the law" works. What I care about is the apparent notion that high-level executives are suddenly deemed responsible for the prudence of their employees' personal finances.
Like the folks at MediaBistro, I'm sorry to hear that Anne Applebaum is leaving the WaPost. She's a serious historian with a lively mind and a great devotion to human freedom. It's insulting to her talents and unique voice to say, as MediaBistro does, that "Most sad of all, however, is that Applebaum's departure leaves the Post's editorial/opinion pages virtually female-free." (They actually categorize her with Ellen Goodman.) And Charles Krauthammer is just there to represent the disabled, I suppose.
OK, I can't resist not commenting (I am opinionated; therefore I blog!)
Anyone interested in the sordid history of the Soviet Union would do well to read Applebaum's incomparable Gulag. And then, apply the principles learned in that book to China, and explain to me why it is a prima facie case that the world's next big growth engine will be China. Because it ain't a prima facie case.
Can someone explain to me how China is supposed to thrive, given that the quality of its educational system does not meet western standards? Well educated people are the foundation on which modern economies depend; China can't rely forever on putting together widgets for Mattel and Intel:
Alarmed by the specter of unemployed graduates taking to the streets, the [Chinese] government this week imposed tight limits on the number of students Chinese colleges can enroll. Admissions will now be allowed to increase only in line with economic growth -- which means by around 8% annually. This follows a four-fold increase in student enrollments since 1998, as new institutions of higher education sprung up to cope with the increased demand triggered by rising prosperity,But Beijing's move does nothing to address the real problem, which is not the quantity of graduates but their quality. For all the headlines in the Chinese media about job shortages, foreign multinationals frequently complain of being unable to find enough talented graduates. A recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that fewer than 10% of Chinese graduates in professions such as engineering and accounting have the skills needed to work in a foreign company.
That's because, in addition to often low English standards, the Chinese educational system emphasizes rote learning far more than it encourages students to think for themselves. "Education in China basically means memorizing," a foreign academic teaching in Beijing told us this week. "Traditionally the Chinese government has not encouraged students to ask a lot of questions."
The problem from the Party's perspective is that students taught to ask questions may end up asking the "wrong" ones. So the Beijing leadership is left with the Hobson's choice of either risking unrest among jobless graduates or overhauling the educational system to make students more employable -- at the price of encouraging them to question the Party's grip on power.
How is an economy supposed to grow into a sophisticated world power if its school churn out graduates unable to think for themselves? This is reminiscent of a debate I used to have with my grandfather, in which he lamented the decline of rote learning in America's schools. Never mind, I told him, that the post world War II generation (i.e., his kids' generation) created more wealth than any other group of people in the history of the world (the largest creation of legal wealth in history, in the words of one famous venture capitalist). Rote learning may be fine for agrarian or industrial economies, but not for the information- and data-rich economies which currently control the world.
The Wall St. Journal reports that Opus Dei is presenting itself as a victim of Hollywood, in light of the release of the Da Vinci Code movie:
So, while some Catholic groups are boycotting the film and threatening legal action, Opus Dei is calmly promoting its work and presenting itself as a victim of Hollywood. Instead of generating buzz, it wants to be seen as banal."People who come here looking for something surprising or shocking are going to be very disappointed," said Jean Granier, a schoolteacher, father of 10, and Opus Dei member who this week took part in an open house at the group's center in Marseille, France. "What we do is very, very ordinary." His oldest daughter, Aude, also a member, handed out pamphlets explaining that, contrary to "The Da Vinci Code," Opus Dei "has no monks, no murders, no masochism and no misogyny."
Outside PR professionals say the outreach strategy carries risks. "I think their lemonade is going to turn sour in the end," said Simon Holberton, a partner of Brunswick Group LLP, a London public-relations firm. "They are going to get lots of applications from nutters -- survivalists and others who like inflicting pain on themselves."
As for the cilice, a dozen members at the Marseille gathering all said they had never tried it and never would.
If ever there were a way to create fodder for mockery it is by acting as a victim. (It should also be noted that Holberton's comment seems at once dismissive and utterly ignorant. I don't think those who want to remind themselves of Christ's pain on the cross "like" inflicting pain on themselves; understanding Opus Dei in terms of an S&M fetish is perhaps the height of foolishness, even if it is true that the idea of "spritual mortification" involves the infliction of pain.)
As one wise Catholic recently put it: it's fiction; get over it.
Elsewhere in the Journal, here's a more sober, realistic, and acerbic take on the success of Brown's novel, namely, people like conspiracy theories:
Here's my theory of "The Da Vinci Code." Dan Brown was sitting one night at the monthly meeting of his local secret society, listening to a lecture on the 65th gospel, and he got to thinking: "I wonder if there's any limit to what people are willing to believe these days about a conspiracy theory. Let's say I wrote a book that said Jesus was married. To Mary Magdalene. Who was pregnant at the Crucifixion. And she is the Holy Grail. Jesus wanted her to run the church as a global sex society called Heiros Gamos, but Peter elbowed her out of the job. Her daughter was the beginning of the Merovingian dynasty of France. Jesus' family is still alive. There were 80 gospels, not four. Leonardo DiCaprio, I mean da Vinci, knew all this. The 'Mona Lisa' is Leonardo's painting of himself in drag. Da Vinci's secret was kept alive by future members of 'the brotherhood,' including Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and Victor Hugo. The Catholic Church is covering all this up."
In a word, Brown saw a market opportunity, exploited it, and the Catholic Church was left flailing, as it were, in the wind. The Church would do well to heed the lesson of markets, as its evangelical brethren have, and market itself to people. Perhaps Opus Dei should go check out the Saddleback Church, figure out why it attract religion consumers by the thousands, and leverage the market opportunity presented.
But no, it's easier to be the victim than it is to be the innovator. Just ask Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan. Those are the people with whom Opus Dei holds company if its desire is to be seen as a victim.
Fox News anchor John Gibson recently signed off on one of his segments with a bizarre set of instructions: viewers should turn the TV off find their (heterosexual) lover and procreate.
Media Matters seems to imply that Gibson's appeal to population growth is baldly racist, and I'm not sure I disagree:
On The Big Story, John Gibson urged viewers to "[d]o your duty. Make more babies," because he had found out, from a recently released report, that nearly half of all children under the age of five in the United States are minorities. Gibson added: "You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic." Gibson later repeated: "To put it bluntly, we need more babies."
Via Reason.
His is an odd statement to make if we assume that he thinks there need to be more babies because he's worried that America's population is declining: it is not. The only other conclusion that seems reasonable is that Gibson seems threatened by the idea of non-whites comprising a majority in America.
The more coherent commentators on the issue of illeal immigration note that the best way for America to stem the tide of illegal immigrants would be to help or compel the countries which supply illegal immigrants to restructure their countries' economies so that thier citiziens have less incentive to risk life and limb coming here illegally.
The most obvious target of such a policy would be Mexico, but, Marxist revolutionaries still occupy center stage in its political theater:
Subcommander Marcos, the Zapatista rebel leader, latched on to an ugly clash last week between the police and farmers outside the capital to revive his flagging campaign for a socialist movement that he hopes will someday topple the government without a shot.Marcos appeared on national television on Tuesday and let himself be interviewed at length for the first time in years. As always, he appeared in his black ski mask and military fatigues, a headset atop his frayed cap, a pipe in his mouth.
He denounced the brutality of the police in putting down the rioting farmers, who wielded machetes and threw firebombs. He also accused the state and federal authorities of provoking the violence, raping women and jailing innocents.
Never mind that this type of agitprop does not portray an entirely accurate picture of Mexico:
But he refuses to take off his trademark ski mask, to take part in the election or to form a political party. Instead, Rafael Guillén, a college professor who became one of the most gifted orators of Mexican politics, has clung to the persona of Subcommander Marcos, an icon of the far left, who inspired millions of Mexicans in 1994 when he led an army out of the jungles of the southern state of Chiapas.Times have changed since then. The corrupt and authoritarian party that ruled Mexico from the 1930's through the 1990's is out of power. Mexico has a functioning democracy. Armed revolutionaries are no longer in fashion.
Marcos's campaign for a new left-wing movement has not caught on. His speeches have attracted little notice in the news media and have not drawn big crowds. Even when Marcos recently declared that it did not matter who won the election, because the government would eventually be overthrown, the incumbent administration of President Vicente Fox ignored his remarks.
Since the riot, his supporters' protests have been modest. Most Mexicans appear to be more focused on the presidential race and the bickering between candidates from the three main parties.
Felipe Calderón, the candidate of Mr. Fox's conservative National Action Party, said the times had passed Marcos by. "What Mexico wants is to live in peace, to live a democratic life — that is to say, just the ideals that Marcos probably does not share," Mr. Calderón told reporters as he left a campaign event near the capital. "He doesn't share them because he has opted for violence, while Mexicans are choosing democracy."
Says the Volokh Conspiracy's Jim Lindgren:
The idea of diversity is to listen to people who are saying different things that you might not have thought of or agree with, not just to listen to your friends and people like your friends.
Ironic, considering McCain's campaign finance reform, that these words are being written about a petition aimed at stopping John McCain from speaking at the New School commencement.
Silly liberals! Free speech for me but not for thee is evidently their raison d'etre.
UPDATE: Jim Lindgren has more here.
Well, I'm now a victim of the Drug War.
See, I have the genetic misfortune to be allergic to cats, and I'm not too bright, so I have cats. Which prompted me to re-stock my Claritin supplies. Upon getting to CVS I was told to show ID, and then informed that they could only sell me one box of the dangerous drugs.
CVS has lost my business, the stupid fuckers.
The headline on the New York Times Magazine*:
"Ever imagine what it might be like to live in a place that voted to thoroughly criminalize abortion? A place that sent abortion providers to jail? That policed hospitals? That investigated a woman's uterus? Welcome to 21st century San Salvador, the state of anti-abortion."
Clearly, the article will be biaed in favor of fewer restrictions on abortion, at least based on the headline. (I have not yet read the article.)
*No link provided because I can't find one.
The controversy now raging over illegal immigration too often focuses on the problem itself, and not the reasons behind the problem. Simly put, people see the United States as offering more opportunity than Mexico or Latin America, and, therefore, are willing to risk life, limb, and deportation to come here.
I have long thought that it would be in the United States' interest to invest in Mexico and help modernize its economy. Remove the incentive for poor Mexicans to risk injury or death in attempting to come to the United States, and a lot of the problems associated with illegal immigration would disappear. To some extent, this would be an exercise in nation building, but it would be rather different than the current quagmire in Iraq. Mexico, for one thing, is a relatively stable country, largely free of the internecine tribal and religious battles that have so riven Iraq.
In any event, the Economist argues much the same thing:
Many senior figures in both parties, ranging from John McCain on the right to Ted Kennedy on the left, favour the kind of compromise espoused by Mr Bush. In the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 27th, they prevailed. By 12 votes to six, they approved a bill that would combine tougher border enforcement with a scheme under which existing illegals could obtain a visa and, eventually, citizenship. A further 400,000 visas would be issued each year for new arrivals. This is probably about the best compromise that could be reached, although its passage by the full Senate, let alone a conference of both houses, is far from certain.To make such a scheme work, Mexico's co-operation would be important. Hitherto, Mexican governments have been unwilling as much as unable to prevent the flow of their own people across their northern border, or of Central and South Americans across their southern frontier. The visa scheme gives Mexico more of an incentive to do so.
So Mr Bush had something to show when he flew to Cancún for a meeting on March 30th and 31st with Mexico's Vicente Fox and Stephen Harper, the new Canadian prime minister. But the leaders should recognise that faster economic growth in Mexico would do more than any legislative fix to take the heat out of America's immigration argument.
When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force in 1994, it was hoped that Mexico's economy would quickly converge with the United States. That hasn't happened. In the late 1990s, Mexico's GDP grew half as fast again as America's. No longer. China has partly displaced Mexico as a supplier of low-wage manufacturing. Nowadays, Mexico creates decent jobs for only around a quarter of the 800,000 who join its workforce each year.
The main way to change that is for Mexico's next president, who will be elected in July, to push through long-delayed reforms of taxes, energy, labour and competition laws. But there is one way the United States could help. Lack of roads and railways mean that the benefits of NAFTA have been largely confined to northern Mexico, rather than the poorer centre and south where most migrants come from. A North American infrastructure fund—in which the United States matched Mexican investment—makes much more sense than spending money on a border wall. In the long run, a richer Mexico means a richer and more secure United States.
The New York Times, trying to prove its digital savviness, has started a blog chronicling the mayoral race in Newark, New Jersey, between the anti-Semitic, Sharptonesque Sharpe James, and the football-playing, Rhodes Scholar Cory Booker.
Both James and Booker are Democrats, so I would never support them, given that the Deomcrats support causes such as public education and higher taxes.
But Booker is a smart man; he is, unlike Obama, a genuine rising star in the Democratic party, and his political future has horizons far beyond the fetid dump that is New Jersey politics.
Odds are, NOW's mebership overlaps significantly with antiwar and animal-rights groups' memberships.
Odd, then, that NOW argued that protesters at abortion clinics violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). As the Wall St. Journal astutely observes:
RICO was designed to go after Tony Soprano, not church groups passing out leaflets on a sidewalk. But NOW claimed the latter were engaged in racketeering to "extort" the "property" of abortion seekers by demonstrating in front of clinics. Since RICO violators are subject to treble damages, the plan was to bankrupt protesters or frighten them from ever exercising their First Amendment rights.Had that strategy worked, it would have quickly become a favorite of anyone trying to stop acts of legal civil disobedience. Antiwar protesters and animal-rights activists would have been prime targets, to name just two liberal causes.
Anna Nicole's breasts have no power in the Supreme Court, writes Dahlia Lithwick:
It seems cruel to report that Anna Nicole then stood and exited the courtroom, leaving the building by a side door and again granting no interviews. I would love to tell you that she did something, anything, to distinguish herself from the thousands of appellants who have brought their cases into these marble walls. But the court has worked its magical spell of blandness, even upon Anna, and she is just another litigant with a probate dispute today. She has stepped into the only place in America where her breasts have no power.
Via Volokh.
Give me L.A. glitz and superficiality over D.C.'s pretentious ponderousness any day of the week. I'll take (inflated) breasts over inflated oratory, with a side of legs, thanks!
Andrea Yates rejects 35 years in prison for murdering her four children.
Execute her.
I make no bones about my support for the death penalty.
It should be applied far more frequently than it is.
In 2000, seven employees at a Wendy's restaurant were gunned down in cold blood; that the murderers have not been executed is an unconscionable travesty of justice.
Details here.
London's Mayor, Ken Livingstone, has been censured for making some offensive comments to a journalist. Livingstone compared a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard.
Some have called this an anti-Semitic remark.
But consider a different situation, in which a white student complains to his black teacher, "You're like a slavedriver, giving us so much homework!" Racist? Or just sophomoric? It is rather a stretch to assert that a judgment about a race is being made in such a comment. How is comparing a tenacious journalist to a prison guard anti-Semitic? If anything, Livingstone is inferring that he does not like the journalist's behavior; his comparison of the journalist to a Nazi prison guard is hardly a ringing endorsement of either, it would seem.
Others disagree.
Customs officials claim its the responsibility of passengers to inform them when there is a risk that goods being imported into the United States may be contaminated with anthrax:
Interviews and records show that the authorities had at least two chances to prevent the spread of the disease and that both, in the end, depended on Mr. Diomande's telling them the details about what he was bringing back from Africa. As of yesterday, it appeared he had not, officials said.The first time that Mr. Diomande, who lives in Greenwich Village, was obligated to inform authorities about his purchases was when he packed the shipments of goatskins to send them out of Ivory Coast as cargo. A law enforcement official said that Mr. Diomande shipped the skins in a plane's cargo hold, not as part of his carry-on bags or checked personal luggage. It is unclear on what date he did this.
But United States Customs and Border Protection officials in New York and Washington say that if Mr. Diomande had followed regulations precisely, an entry form filed with a Customs broker would have spelled out what was being imported.
The assumption that passengers are going to be dutiful about filling out forms is a naive one. Customs shoudl rethink their strategy. Being a government agency, they will not.
Fieldston, a private school in the Bronx which attracts many wealthy families, and which has a history of sending its students to elite colleges and universities, has fired the latest salvo in the culture wars.
The school had arranged for two Palestinians to address the school, and some kids and parents became upset either because two Palestinians had been invited to speak, or that no Israelis had been invited, the assembly was canceled, and then came the Censorship Brigades:
Students said that news of the cancellation spread on Tuesday night, and that by Wednesday morning, someone had papered the school walls with fliers featuring the slogan "Progressive Education + Censorship = Oxymoron," and quotations from Aristotle. A profanity and the word "censor" was scrawled on a plaque in a hallway, they said.Yesterday, at Salvatores of Soho, a pizzeria near the school, a group of hyper-articulate sophomores on their lunch break dissected the controversy over slices and soda.
"Every hallway, every corridor, this is the topic," said Jake Chaplin, 16.
Evan Krasner, 16, said that while he was a "great believer in the First Amendment," he thought the panel was poorly planned. "How can this be a diverse debate? It's two sides of one side."
Well, first, this is not an issue of the First Amendment. Fieldston is a private school, not a government entity, and therefore owes no fealty to the First Amendment. Second, this is not an issue of 'censorship' because an intelligent young kid born to wealthy parents has an (uncensored) internet connection at home, through which he can read all the Palestinian and Israeli propaganda he wants.
Finally, the notion that "progressive education" and "censorship" constitute an oxymoron is, well, moronic. Oxymorons, as any rhetorician knows, are verbal constructions which use words with opposing meanings. "Deafening silence" is the classic example of an oxymoron. In order for a phrase to be an oxymoron, one has to establish that the two things being compared are, indeed, opposed to each other. That which is deafening cannot be silent.
It is not clear that "progressive" is opposed to "censorship" because many self-described progressives do squelch debate: look at feminists, P.C. advocates, etc. The halls of academia are legion with "progressives" engaging in all manner of attempts to squelch those views that do not accord with their views.
John Dingell, democratic Representative from the late, great lamented state of Michigan is sucking at the teat of Ford and GM. Says he of the White House's recent admonition that automakers ought to focus on making products customers want to buy:
In my 50 years of public service, I've never seen an administration of either party that has actively and publicly put down American products, companies and workers the way this administration has done with our auto manufacturers. How can they hope to sell more cars when the number one spokesman for their competitors is the White House?
There are a number of problems with this statement, the most obvious being that this fool has been in public "service" for 50 years. That public "service" can be extended into a lifetime of wasting taxpayers' money is travesty enough; that Dingell is so ignorant as to claim that the White House's obligation is to prop up a failing industry is dangerous, collectivist-style thinking. This is the same type of thinking that killed untold tens of millions of people suffering under the Soviet regime.
Dingell is an old-style liberal who earnestly believes that the solution to Ford and GM's problem is government intervention. That his worldview has been repudiated thousands of times over the course of the past century is irrelevant to him because ignorant blue collar auto workers continue to re-elect him. Consider the source, they say: this man's opinions are as unbiased as those of a Red Sox fan in Ipswich, MA. Which is to say there is no substance to his words: he says what he believes because, as with a religious fundamentalist, his understanding of the world is too ignroant and myopic to consider that there are other, more accurate ways to understand the world.
History will judge this fool as a mere footnote in American history.
Bush to automakers: drop dead. Nothing is more simple, more true, and more beautiful than that. The automakers have fucked themselves over; there is no reason for the American taxpayer to bail them out. Fuck them.
From Jon Stewart:
Jon Stewart: "I'm joined now by our own vice-presidential firearms mishap analyst, Rob Corddry. Rob, obviously a very unfortunate situation. How is the vice president handling it?Rob Corddry: "Jon, tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Wittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush.
"And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington's face."
Jon Stewart: "But why, Rob? If he had known Mr. Whittington was not a bird, why would he still have shot him?"
Rob Corddry: "Jon, in a post-9-11 world, the American people expect their leaders to be decisive. To not have shot his friend in the face would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak."
Jon Stewart: "That's horrible."
Rob Corddry: "Look, the mere fact that we're even talking about how the vice president drives up with his rich friends in cars to shoot farm-raised wingless quail-tards is letting the quail know 'how' we're hunting them. I'm sure right now those birds are laughing at us in that little 'covey' of theirs.
Jon Stewart: "I'm not sure birds can laugh, Rob."
Rob Corddry: "Well, whatever it is they do … coo .. they're cooing at us right now, Jon, because here we are talking openly about our plans to hunt them. Jig is up. Quails one, America zero.
Jon Stewart: "Okay, well, on a purely human level, is the vice president at least sorry?"
Rob Corddry: "Jon, what difference does it make? The bullets are already in this man's face. Let's move forward across party lines as a people … to get him some sort of mask."
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