Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Two Optical Illusions: One Smart, One Stupid-Scary

Posted on January 4, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

The Dragon Illusion (video) is one super-smart illusion. It uses the way eyes and brain are wired to take advantage of mistaken assumptions:

When we see a solid object rotating, there are all sorts of clues that tell us what is going on, which way it is rotating, etc. The dragon gives us the wrong clues, because we mis-interpret what its shape is. The nose of the dragon appears to be pointing out towards the viewer, but in fact the dragon's head is concave.

The Bush plan to create deficit-cutting bragging rights also tries to take advantage of mistaken assumptions, primarily the one that our goverment wouldn't lie quite this brazenly:

To make Mr. Bush's goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year's actual shortfall of $413 billion.

By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.

But White House budget planners are not stopping there. Administration officials are also invoking optimistic assumptions about rising tax revenue while excluding costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as trillions of dollars in costs that lie just outside Mr. Bush's five-year budget window. …

“I've been watching this more than 30 years, and I have never seen anything quite this egregious,” said Stanley Collender, a longtime author on budget issues and a senior vice president at Financial Dynamics, a communications firm in Washington. …

Administration officials are omitting a second big group of costs for goals Mr. Bush has identified but not formally proposed.

By far the biggest of these is his plan to privatize Social Security in part and let people divert some of their payroll taxes to private accounts.

In otherwords, a complete tissue of lies.

Trickery makes for cute toys, but not cute budgets.

Posted in Econ & Money, Science/Medicine | 3 Comments

Sleaze Meme Draws First Blood

Posted on January 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

They're running scared on the sleaze issue! GOP caves on two ethics changes: no watering down of the House ethics rule, and a reversal of the “DeLay Rule” that would have allowed indicted House leaders to keep their jobs. (via Talkleft, TPM and the rest of the world…)

Why? “it was becoming a distraction.” In other words – the mud was starting to stick.

This is only the warm up act, people. Today's GOP is a target-rich environment on the sleaze issue.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | Comments Off on Sleaze Meme Draws First Blood

That Bar Is Looking Mighty Low, Senator

Posted on January 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, is quoted in today's New York Times as saying about Attorney General nominee Alberto R. Gonzales (the man who approved the Torture Memos),

“Generally, for an executive branch position the president gets the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “The general feeling on the committee is that he has probably met that lowered threshold.”

Whether Sen. Schumer was expressing a normative or a positive view, that is whether the quote represented Schumer's personal view or only Schumer's impression of the views of his fellow Senators on the committee, it's pretty horrible when the Senate's advice and consent role is this stunted. The bar is pretty low when that “lowered threshold” will admit a nominee who, in commissioning and passing on the torture memos participated in a scheme to

  1. attempt to put a patina of legality on war crimes and
  2. totally twist the Constitution to suggest the President has powers akin to Louis XIVth's and
  3. mis-state the relevant precedents to make it seem like the above have substantial judicial support when in fact the opposite is true.

There is of course an element of political calculation here. Many chickenhearted Senators believe that they expend political capital by opposing cabinet nominations, when in fact opposing the right ones may create it. But even if I'm wrong about that, for some things — torture, fundamental constitutional principles — the calculations should be left aside.

As far as I'm concerned, Congress was almost as much to blame for Iraq as Bush — they wrote him a blank check, with the Gulf of Tonkin precedent sitting there in front of them. If there isn't some serious attempt in Congress to come to grips with the torture scandal in the next year, then some of the torture dirt will stick to them as well.

Posted in Politics: US | 26 Comments

Digby Said It

Posted on January 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

I've been trying to write something comprehensive about the the state of the torture memos, US torture policy, and the coming confirmation hearings of the Enabler, one White House Counsel Gonzales. But it's too depressing.

So just read Hullabaloo. Digby says most of it. (And even has one small tiny ray of light — not quite everyone is going to take Gonzales lying down.)

Posted in Guantanamo, Iraq Atrocities | 3 Comments

Shabbir in Pakistan

Posted on January 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Shabbir Safdar is a progressive activist in DC and, I know from personal observation, anonymous benefactor of good causes.

Part of the Pakistanian diaspora, over the holidays Shabbir revisited the ancestral homeland for the first time in 25 years, and he gives us a few tantalizing glimpses of the nation, and the cultural divides, plus some great photos, in Shabbir's Pakistan Diaries.

Posted in Readings | 1 Comment

The American Gulag

Posted on January 2, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

The US holds maybe hundreds of non-citizens, all captured abroad (we are told), incarcerated in Guantanamo and in other secret prisons around the world. The Bush administration plans to hold them up to forever.

Of course, there is a difference between the Soviet Gulag, which was aimed at saboteurs, dissidents, or people who somehow got on the wrong end of officialdom, and the US Gulag, which is we are told aimed merely at the foreign version of the same.

Whether the creation of a secret archipelago of prisons and coercive questioning facilities will inevitably fail to be deployed against US citizens is a question that one is not permitted to ask in public, as it is too far outside the permitted consensus. So put that issue aside.

Ask instead whether from a moral, political, or even legal point of view, the fact that only foreigners are incarcerated for life without trial (or indeed any rights, it appears), at the complete and unconstrained pleasure of the super-imperial presidency, gives us much in the way of bragging rights over the former Soviet Union.

What's that? Our gulag is much smaller? And our policy this week is not to torture people, the last two years notwithstanding? And that nice Mr. Bush (with Justice Thomas's endorsement, to his and the Court's eternal shame) promises that all the people being held really deserve it, so who needs complications like a trial?

Well, that's alright then!

Posted in Guantanamo, Iraq Atrocities | 5 Comments