For what it’s worth, I’m not. And for what it’s worth, I beg you not to be.

With a couple days perspective under his belt, Andrew offers the following analysis (emphasis mine),

My sense is that Obama understands that his core responsibility as president is not being a partisan figure. That’s what he ran against in many ways. And I think he sees all this in terms of eight years. He is gambling on democracy working over time, on the president setting the general direction but allowing the Congress and the public to decide how fast and how specific they want to get. He always said he wanted to be the president of the red states and the blue states. His major problems right now are a) an apoplectic and incoherent opposition that feels it is doing something by randomly harnessing populist frustration in a recession and playing the Rovian politics which is all they know and b) a useless bunch of disorganized morons and cowards who make up the Congressional Democrats.

But he’s still by far the best thing we have going for us. And this struggle has just begun. Politics is not magic; it’s not a one-off event. It’s a process of grueling argument, tussling and debate. And the deeper truth is: many Independents who are ornery right now like Obama. His decency and civility and reason are plain to see. And so this is his moment as well. To be the anchor in a turbulent time and to keep making the arguments for necessary reform.

I’m with Andrew  in terms of rejecting the notion of “politics as magic”, but I can’t help feeling like his own unwavering belief in Obama is, to some degree, underwriting the very, “I’m done” defeatism he begs his readers not to give in to. [Read more →]

Today is our one-year anniversary, so I thought I’d post a little note congratulating all the contributors for their hard work over the past year and congratulating all of our commenters for their role in creating a great community around the site. No long winded reflection on the past year to follow, just the suggestion that you git yo’self some cake today.

The first thought arose from reading the following quote by Andrew Sprung, linked to by Andrew Sullivan, about Webb’s comments around health care reform following Scott Brown’s win,

We have one party that has not got the brains to govern. Will we now learn for certain that we have another party that hasn’t got the guts?

It doesn’t strike me as entirely fair to suggest that this failure to recapture Kennedy’s seat and the potential failure of health care reform is due to Democrats being “gutless”. Rather, I think what it points to is the fact that the Democratic Party is a deeply divided institution and those divisions lie along significant fault lines of principle about what it means to be a “liberal” today. [Read more →]

Of course, the whole article is worth a read, but a line from the beginning caught my eye in particular,

Bureau officials said agents were working quickly under the stress of trying to thwart the next terrorist attack and were not violating the law deliberately.

I believe that that is true and, in fact, I believe that under the vast majority of recent cases involving improper to illegal behaviour, those involved were not intending to do wrong and were labouring under the sincere belief that their actions were designed specifically to avoid a greater potential wrongdoing. The sincerity of that belief is why I find it so dangerous and, in no small part, why I think a healthy skepticism about the actions of government, especially in those recesses of those dark corners of gray, isn’t just warranted — it is mandatory. [Read more →]

As EKOS President Frank Graves notes,

For those who have been speculating as to whether Canadians really care about the ‘obscure’ issue of prorogation the evidence is now incontrovertible[.] Canadians have noticed, they do care and this is having a very negative impact on Conservative fortunes.”

The past couple of months have just been an utter PR nightmare for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and there inability to address Canadians on issues of import in regards to their government is as much a condemnation as anything else they’ve bungled lately. What I find most interesting is that throughout the Afghan detainee scandal and the prorogation of Parliament, Harper et al have seemed to rely on this notion that “average Canadians” don’t care about these issues and the more they lean on that messaging, the more it hurts them.

As Graves notes further in the release, this hasn’t resulted in a noticeable electoral boon to the Liberals, which Graves attributes as a “comfort” to Harper. I disagree, not insofar as I think that this polling indicates an immanent Liberal resurgence, but rather because I don’t think this trend is a blip on the Conservative’s radar. It seems clear that many Canadians feel as though they have been treated with disregard and contempt by their governing party and that sentiment in unlikely to fade given that Harper’s movements over the past two months have, by my lights, belied a contemptible attitude towards his fellow Canadians.

In short, the PR disaster here is less about mis-messaging on key issues as it is about communicating what Harper actually thinks on those issues vis-a-vis his fellow Canadians.

In that regard, I think Harper and the Conservatives have a much more daunting hurdle to clear here than a lot of Canadian analysts are acknowledging. That’s true in no small part because it seems as though a decent chunk of Canadians get the sincerity of that messaging and are honestly offended by it. But those same Canadians aren’t headed in the Liberal’s direction in droves and so a clear alternative has yet to emerge from the frey.

That being the case, I think the NDP need to figure out what it’s going to do in the proceeding months to convince Canadians that they are that alternative and so the next little while is pretty key for them. The NDP has been faced with these moments before and has yet to really capitalize on them, so I have little evidence for being optimistic about their chances — but a chance I do believe they have.

My own advice would be to stop tacking to the centre in an attempt to wear as an off-white version of the Liberals. Canada is honestly lacking a left-of-centre party with some soul, integrity and an air of trustworthiness. The Liberals like to sell themselves as such, except that no one is yet buying the “soul” “integrity” and “trustworthy” parts just yet. Such a strategy might not lead anywhere near forming government territory, but then, neither has anything else the NDP has done to date.

What it might do, though, is break that rouhgly 15% barrier with which the Party has been struggling for years, which would be a step in the right direction for the NDP and, concurrently, Canadians, I think. What I’d really like to see the NDP do is take the first step in dropping the pantomime of political posturing around what the various parties think Canadians want and just be the parties they are. We have a multi-party system for a reason, it’s time the major parties acknowledged that fact.

The pathologists place the time of death “at least a couple of hours” before the bodies were discovered, which would be sometime before 10:30 p.m. on June 9. Additionally, the autopsy of Al-Salami states that his hyoid bone was broken, a phenomenon usually associated with manual strangulation, not hanging.

The report asserts that the hyoid was broken “during the removal of the neck organs.” An odd admission, given that these are the very body parts—the larynx, the hyoid bone, and the thyroid cartilage—that would have been essential to determining whether death occurred from hanging, from strangulation, or from choking. These parts remained missing when the men’s families finally received their bodies.

I actually have an incredibly difficult time wrapping my head around the degree of dehumanization that goes into making the decision to simply remove the “neck organs” of men who have died in US custody from being strangled and  having rags stuffed down their throats. It’s as though the line of logic took a sort of “out of sight, out of mind” track: if we get rid of any evidence of wrongdoing, we can wipe the very event from the record oand carry on as if nothing is awry.

Andrew is, I think, right to suggest that this story, “really takes you into the realm of totalitarian states”. Overused a characterization as it is, the kind of sociopathic belief that reality, history, and the course of events can be shaped to meet the needs of the centres of power by the crude and blatant erasure of inconvenient facts (like necks organs) is terrifyingly Orwellian in nature.

If there is any wonder why I have railed so hard against my own country’s tacit involvement in enabling torture, this is more than reason enough. The institutionalization of this kind of damaged mindset, then, is the logical culmination of finding ways of justifying the use of torture, regardless of the circumstances. Not only do the ground rules of right and wrong become elastic, but the very notion of what did and did not happen becomes a matter of debate — trading the elimination of words for body parts.

Anyone who thinks that such a cancer won’t eventually spread to decisions involving the everyday lives of citizens has a distinctly more rosy outlook than I.

Divided We Stand, United We Fall provides a thorough overview of the Brown-Coakley race in Massachusetts.

Kyle Cupp looks at coercion versus torture.

Over at NeoMugwump, Dennis Sanders takes a critical look at the conservative inclination towards a healthy skepticism of government metastasizing into deep contempt.

At City of Brass, Aziz Poonwalla calls out Pat Robertson’s un-Christian and cruel comments towards Haiti.

D.A. Ridgley of Positive Liberty reviews The Book of Eli.