Month: February 2013

“If it is reporting, it’s bad reporting”


by digby

I was going to type up a blistering screed against this Will Saletan column in which he clearly implies that he was persuaded by torturers that torture isn’t such a bad thing after all — while also maintaining just enough distance to allow himself to weasel out of it if confronted. It’s a typical trick of certain Villager types who are drawn to facile right wing solutions to problems but know they will be criticized for being immoral and cruel if they own up to it. I decided not to bother finishing my piece when I saw this one from Lindsay Beyerstein:

Saletan structures the column to give himself maximum cover. He starts out by saying that the AEI panel changed his mind, then he enumerates the panelists’ arguments, and in the final section he mouths some platitudes about how we should all be willing to reexamine our moral positions.

If it is reporting, it’s bad reporting. Saletan takes the claims of the most senior architects of torture at face value. These guys know more about the program than almost anyone, so we can’t afford to reflexively discount what they say about it, if we want to understand it, but let’s keep in mind that they are professional deceivers who, at best, skirted the law and at worst broke it. They see themselves as fighting an ongoing war and they know that what they say now will have implications for how that war goes. They have every reason to lie about what they did and how they did it.

Saletan blithely ignores basic critical questions like: If torture was so effective, why didn’t we catch Bin Laden during the height of the torture era? Why did it take over a decade?

He comes across as utterly credulous, producing lines like: “So, for what it’s worth, there were internal checks on the practice, at least because the CIA would be politically accountable for what its interrogators did.” Right. That’s why Jose Rodriguez deleted all those interrogation tapes.

That’s just a taste. Please read the whole thing.

To my mind, torture apologists should be treated like Holocaust deniers. Torture is that bad and anyone who defends it should be subjected to the most extreme skepticism and frankly, derision. There are some things that are beyond the pale. Or should be.

Unlike Jonathan Alter, who also endorsed torture, Saletan doesn’t have the excuse that he is still in the throes of 9/11 trauma. He just listened to some tough guy torturers and decided they had a point. But he was too cowardly to come out and admit it, so he wrote his piece in a way that gives him some this deniability.  Beyerstein takes his column apart, piece by piece.

But this is nothing new for Saletan. He’s been trying to find the sweet spot between mendacious right wing immorality and mainstream liberalism for years. I’ll just reprise my favorite Saletan quote from long ago:

If you want to see the tricks of the right exposed, read Somerby. If you want to hear the tricks of the left exposed, listen to Limbaugh. But if you don’t want to get trapped inside either wing’s echo chamber, read Slate.

Can you see what’s wrong with that picture?  I knew that you could.

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Barbarism, rape, race and wergeld

by David Atkins

A horrific story of a horrific crime and its shocking legal acceptance in Saudi Arabia:

A ‘celebrity’ Saudi preacher accused of raping and torturing his five-year-old daughter to death has been released from custody after agreeing to pay ‘blood money’.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi had been accused of killing his daughter Lama, who suffered multiple injuries including a crushed skull, broken back, broken ribs, a broken left arm and extensive bruising and burns.

Social workers say she had also been repeatedly raped and burnt.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi admitted using a cane and cables to inflict the injuries after doubting his five-year-old daughter’s virginity, according to the campaign group Women to Drive.

Rather than getting the death penalty or receiving a long sentence for the crime, Fayhan al-Ghamdi served only a few months in jail before a judge ruled the prosecution could only seek ‘blood money’.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi, who regularly appears on television in Saudi Arabia, is said to have agreed to pay £31,000 to Lama’s mother.

The money is considered compensation under Islamic law, although it is only half the amount that would have been paid had Lama been a boy.

But it must be because they’re Muslim Arabs, right? White Christians would never do such a thing, right? Well, not exactly. It’s actually just wergild, the old tribal system practiced in much Europe all the way through a good chunk of the Christian Middle Ages in which the wealthy could essentially pay fines to the families of victims to absolve them of their crimes. The fines for crimes against lower classes were much less severe than crimes against upper classes. Here’s what it looked like in England from the 9th to 11th centuries in cases of rape:

And there’s much more where that came from.

This sort of “law” is prevalent wherever centralized bureaucracies are not in place to keep it in check. This sort of “law” is the natural and inevitable outgrowth of libertarian and anarchist thinking no matter what race or religion is dominant.

And why? Because paying someone off for unspeakable crimes is itself a better solution than generations of blood feuds and violent deaths on the part of people bristling with weapons and angry men absent any sort of overarching authority to put an end to it.

It is, in short, the patriarchal end result of pro-local control, pro-weapons, anti-feminist and anti-statist ideology. Nor is it any wonder that the Scots/Irish Confederate descendants of the same folks who gave us Hatfield McCoy feuds are so eager to return to life without such state encumbrances, and have some of the most backward views in the Western World about the reproductive rights of women. It’s not too far a cry from this:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Heaven forbid these people ever take irretrievable grasp of public policy in this country, or that the social supports that allow for civilized intervention against such barbaric thinking ever disappear. And heaven help the people of Saudi Arabia who suffer yet under such impeccable libertarian conservatism.

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QOTD: Oliver Stone

by digby

I’ve been reading all day about the President of the United States asserting the unilateral right to kill American citizens on the basis of imminent threat that really isn’t imminent. It’s still jarring to me that we are even discussing this as if it were a perfectly normal political debate. But we are.

I couldn’t help thinking of Oliver Stone’s Untold History and his thesis that the American National Security State (and Empire) was created by a mushroom cloud that allowed us to believe that everything is moral when it’s done by us: “The Good Guys”.

Stone’s final narration of the series is well worth reading and contemplating as we think about this:

As we close out this series we must ask ourselves humbly, are we so happy to be number one?  Are we right to try to police this globe?  Have we helped others?  Have we helped ourselves?  Look in the mirror.   Have we perhaps in our self love become the angels of our own despair?  The atomic bomb dropped on Japan was the founding myth of our national security state, and we have as Americans benefited from that.  The bomb allows us to win by any means necessary; which makes us, because we win, right.  And because we are right, we are therefore good.

Under these conditions there is no morality but our own.  And if we hurt or interfere in other nations, the bomb allows us to be forgiven and apparently live without the consequences of our mistakes.  Thus life becomes the law of the jungle and the one with the biggest club feels good because he’s right.  That is the law of brutality that governed Earth at it’s origins many thousands of years ago.

Six empires have collapsed in the lifetime of a person born before World War II; Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the Soviet Union.  Three more empires earlier in the 20th century; China, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.  By the laws of history, therefore the United States will fall sooner or later.

Alfred McCoy suggests our empire just might win this bet with the gods and through space and cyberspace dominate the globe; at least until the mid-decades of the 21st century.  But if so, we will be hated as a tyrant and no tyranny can last.

As an empire we must ask is it not possible still to retract, grow old and wiser without dispair and violence assetting it?  Could not our empire accept the idea now that there is no need for an exceptional mission blessed by divinity; that to be human is enough.  That to fail is not tragic.  To be human is. 

I think back to Franklin Roosevelt, who though dying in his last cable to Churchill wrote:

 “I would minimize the Soviet problem as much as possible, because these problems in one form or another seem to arise everyday and most of them straighten out.”

Calming down the situations that occur, letting things happen without reacting or overreacting; if there was one single place to start, I think it could be with our military.

This way lies in sharing in the needs of other countries.  Sharing technology and trusting a collective will of this planet to survive the coming period.

Let’s surrender our exceptionalism and our arrogance.  Let’s cut out the talk of a dominant America.  Surrender that word ‘dominate’.  Hardliners will object and scream, but theirs is proven not to be the way.  A young woman said to me in the 1970’s, “We need to feminize this planet.”  I thought it strange then, but now I realize there’s nothing wrong with love.  Let us find a way back to respect the law that is the first principle of civilization.  It is the law not of the jungle, but of civilization; when we come together and put aside our differences to preserve certain things that matter.  There is in most all of us a conscience, a higher knowledge of a force that is greater than ourselves, that includes us but is greater than all of us combined.

And for that reason, the history of man is not only one of blood and death, but one also of honor, achievement, uplift memory – and civilization.  The rest, the ugliness of man and the violence and the selfishness will be forgotten.

There is a way forward.  By knowing the past, we can start, step by step – like a baby, reaching for the stars.

I’m afraid we’re still crawling. And falling. I agree that it’s not impossible. But as we speak  we’re debating whether we should torture. And we’re standing by as presidents of two parties declare their right to order the extra-judicial killings, the Democrat of of the pair extending it to American citizens. We’ve got a long way to go.

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by digby

In this piece, RJ Eskow details the elite Villagers’ insistence that the American people are a bunch of spoiled children who want their “goodies” even though “the country” can’t afford them — and that they are going to have to endure pain and sacrifice for the good of the nation.  I think this from early 2009 illustrates the phenomenon perfectly:

MSNBC commentator: … The subtext of all of this [call to service] is “hey Americans, you’re gonna have to do your part too. There may be some sacrifices involved for you too.” Do you think he’s going to use his political capital to make those arguments and will it go beyond rhetoric?

Andrea Mitchell: It does go beyond rhetoric. He needs to engage the American people in this joint venture. That’s part of the call. That’s part of what he needs to accomplish in his spech and in the days following the speech. He needs to make people feel that this is their venture as well and that people are going to need to be more patient and have to contribute and that there will have to be some sacrifice.

And certainly, if he is serious about what he told the Washington Post last week, that he wants to take on entitlement reform, there will be greater sacrifice required from a nation already suffering from economic crisis — to ask people to take a look at their health care and their other entitlements and realize that for the long term health and vitality of the country we’re going to have to give up something that we already enjoy.

(What do you mean “we” rich woman?)

Here’s Lil’ Luke Russert:

If you look at the backdrop, Dylan, just look at the stats. Federal revenue now is at its lowest level since 1950. If you extend the Bush tax cuts the way the Republicans want, you get $3.8 trillion added to the deficits. If you add them the way Democrats want, you get $3 trillion added over the next three years. If you don’t do anything to medicare or medicaid or social security, those programs will not be solvent. 

Both parties don’t want to tell the American people it’s time to drink their tough medicine.
Both parties are going to try to take 2012 as the avenue to have this debate further. But as this debate goes on and on and on. The real difficult decisions, the real ideas of how are we going to cut this deficit, they go unanswered.

But as Eskow points out, the American people have the answer to the projected Social Security shortfall, right here:

A new survey from the National Academy of Social Insurance reinforces previous polling which showed Americans across the political spectrum oppose benefit cuts to Social Security and want wealthy Americans to pay more.

But the NASI study did something new: It presented respondents with a range of options and allowed them to select among them. The results were striking, and revealed a rock-solid consensus which spanned generations and political persuasions: Americans want wealthy people to pay their fair share, but they’re willing to chip in more themselves — so much so, in fact, that Social Security benefits could be increased.

That’s a very good idea, since Social Security’s benefits are among the lowest in the developed world.

“Greedy Geezers” = Selfless Seniors

That includes seniors, as can be seen if you delve into the NASI survey’s findings. Older people’s activism in defense of Social Security has always been primarily selfless. After all, only the “chained CPI” proposal would cut their benefits, and it hadn’t been introduced yet when Simpson called them “greedy geezers.” They were fighting for the generations that follow them, not themselves.

That selflessness is borne out by the NASI survey, which showed that 88 percent of “Silent Generation” respondents — the youngest of whom is 70 — were willing to pay more in taxes to protect the program.

Everybody get together, learn to love one another right now …

That spirit of generosity extends to Baby Boomers, too. Eighty-six percent of them said they “didn’t mind” paying more in taxes to protect the program, even though most benefit-cut proposals would affect Boomers less than the generations that follow them.

The Baby Boom generation lost most of its wealth in the Wall Street financial crisis. Yet it’s still willing to pay up to keep the program solvent — especially for their children’s generation.

The Kids Are AllRight

Younger Americans are willing to make the hard decisions, too. Eighty-seven percent of Gen X-ers and 85 percent of Gen Y-ers were also willing to pay more in taxes in order to protect the program.

Solid majorities of young people were willing to share in the sacrifice, across all income levels.

Consensus At Last

Did you think Republicans never want to pay more taxes? Not true, at least when it comes to Social Security. Three out of four Republicans said they’d be willing to pay more to protect the program. So did 86 percent of independents — and 91 percent of Democrats.

What’s more, 62 percent of Republicans thought we should consider increasing the program’s benefits. So did 71 percent of independents and 84 percent of Democrats.

The President’s vision of bipartisan consensus can be achieved – around strengthening Social Security.

Having Their Cake — And Eating Yours, Too

Guess who isn’t willing to step up and pitch in? The millionaires, billionaires, and corporations behind the deficit hysteria. Their pampered pitchpeople are hiding, too.

After all, the NASI survey’s been out for a week and we haven’t heard a peep from any of them. Not one of them has congratulated the American people for making those “hard choices.” Not one of them has signed on to promote the NASI survey’s common-sense, fiscally responsible agenda for Social Security.

Not even straight-shootin’ Alan Simpson.

I think we can all agree that this was not the “sacrifice” that Simpson or Mitchell or Russert had in mind.

Medicare’s woes are all tied up in rising health care costs which the privileged Villagers think can be solved simply by making senior citizens pay more of them. (One can only conclude that they believe sick old people are faking and if they have to pay they won’t waste the money and costs will come down. Either that or they just hope a bunch of them will die younger to save money.) But even with all that the American people have shown over and over again that they value these programs, they want them to thrive and they are willing to pay for them through taxes.

The ideological and self-interested propaganda of the MOUs and the Republican Party has been very successful in creating the illusion that Americans only want these things as long as they don’t have to pay for them. It just isn’t true.

If this democracy were truly functional everyone would know this. And I would submit that the reason it isn’t functional in this instance is the fact that the media has, for too long, been a willing conduit for this wealthy elite propaganda. I’m going to guess that it’s because many of them are members of that same club or aspire to it.

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QOTD: Bob Beckel

by David Atkins

Bob Beckel on Fox News today:

“You can’t ruin a man’s reputation based on a some hooker in the Dominican Republican.”

He’s talking, of course, about the brewing scandal around New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez.

We don’t know exactly what Robert Menendez may or may not be guilty of, but there’s certainly enough smoke there to indicate there’s probably fire. I personally don’t care what legislators do in the privacy of their bedrooms, but hiring underaged prostitutes is another story. The investigations should continue, and the chips should fall wherever they will.

Republicans are all over the Menendez story, of course, in an attempt to do damage to Democrats. That’s politics, and if Menendez is guilty of what they’re charging, it’s more than fair. It does, however, create the amusing spectacle of the same Republicans who colluded with Abramoff’s ring of prostitution and corruption play the role of defenders of poor women forced into prostitution.

Still, the Bob Beckels of the world can’t help but let their unctuous sexism and racial prejudice ooze through, anyway.

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Giving Coulter cover

by digby

Trying to cover for Ann Coulter is never a good idea:

On Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” on Monday night, conservative commentator Ann Coulter had a message for President Barack Obama: “Screw you” for the suggestion that gun-rights advocates don’t care about children.

But according to Politico’s Dylan Byers, Coulter was in fact telling the media to screw itself, not the president. In a post on Tuesday morning, Byers criticized The Huffington Post for suggesting that Coulter aimed the expletive at the president:

The Huffington Post has posted a story with the headline, “Ann Coulter To Obama: ‘Screw You’ On Gun Control.” I can’t imagine anything more clicky than an influential right-wing pundit telling the President of the United States to screw himself. Unfortunately for the Huffington Post, that’s not what happened.

The Daily Caller reached out to Coulter, the author of “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama,” to ask whom exactly she said should screw itself, himself or herself.

“Obama — and anyone else who says that those of us who don’t support ridiculous gun laws ‘aren’t serious about saving children’ (or whatever Obama said to that effect),” Coulter said in an email to TheDC.

I have to give the Daily Caller credit here for thinking to reference Coulter’s latest book, which adds some delicious context to the whole thing.

But on a more serious note, I’d have to guess that the rest of what she said is where the hardcores would like this argument to go:

“I think this was obvious from what I said right before — paraphrasing Obama’s point saying that — and immediately afterwards — when I said THEY’RE the ones who don’t care about children because they refuse to do anything about the mentally ill.”

I’ve been hearing a lot of this in right wing circles lately. And what they propose to “do” about mental illness isn’t pretty.The problem is that any treatment, whether it’s the cruel 19th century institutions they dream of resurrecting or the 21st century humane version, costs money which they will, of course, refuse to spend.

And I hate to tell them but mental illness can happen to anyone. Even right wing families. They might want to think about that. If they were to approach this with some sensitivity and open-mindedness, there might be a chance for something positive to come out of all this. We do desperately need to upgrade our inadequate mental health system. But I can guarantee that following Ann Coulter will not lead to that solution. For anyone, not even the Republicans.

Oh, and BTW,  I don’t actually care that she said “screw him” to the president. That’s her right. Just like it’s mine to say the same thing to her. Ain’t America grand?

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A confluence of nightmares

by digby

I suppose it was inevitable:

What do you get when you combine the president’s ability to secretly kill American citizens and the recent push to restrict gun access? One of the most bizarre anti-Obama conspiracy theories ever—and it takes a lot to win that prize.

Various tea party activists, libertarian websites and other conspiracy-minded Obama haters are claiming that Russian security forces have discovered that Obama is about to unleash “death squads” across America to assassinate defenders of the Second Amendment. According to Liberty.com, one of the sites perpetuating this latest story, Russian intelligence has outlined the whole nefarious plot in a memo for President Vladimir Putin, detailing the Obama’s administration’s dispatch of “VIPER teams…which is the acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Team, a programme run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and whose agents terrify millions of Americans with Nazi-like Gestapo tactics on a daily basis at airports and who report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”

Liberty.com (run by a Florida tea party leader), which echoes the theory promoted by similar sites, maintains that these teams—800 of them, to be precise—are set to “disperse throughout his country in preparation for what Russian intelligence analysts are predicting to be a series of high-profile killings of dissident Americans set to begin as soon as February 22nd.” Obama has apparently been emboldened to launch such an operation by the recent federal court ruling upholding his right to kill American citizens with drone strikes without explaining why.

It would be a lot easier to marginalize these guys if the Executive branch wasn’t actually asserting the right to unilaterally decide to kill American citizens. As nutty as they are, you have to admit that they have at least some theoretical basis for being concerned. When the government declares it has the constitutional right to kill Americans at its own discretion, unpopular people are not entirely wrong to worry. Right now the enemy is this loose knit terrorist group called Al Qaeda. But it could be something else tomorrow.

This is where the rule of law really helps. It doesn’t soothe the real kooks, but there are probably some people who are going to see this and wonder if it could happen to them. And there’s no way to logically reassure them. If the President can assert this power here there’s really no reason he couldn’t assert it anywhere. Personally, I’m quite sure that President Obama is not doing anything like this Russian rumor says. But I’m certainly not sure that any other president wouldn’t. Legalizing it for Al Qaeda is a step toward normalizing the concept.

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“The proposals that I put forward during the Fiscal Cliff negotiations with Speaker Boehner and others are still very much on the table”

by digby

“… I just want to repeat. The deals that I put forward, the balanced approach of spending cuts and entitlement reform and tax reform that I put forward are still on the table.”

Hookay. We know that the proposals included hikes in the Medicare age and cuts to Veterans and Social Security benefits. (And it’s really curious why that last should be part of deficit discussions since, for the thousandth time, Social Security doesn’t contribute to the deficit.)

Anyway, it would seem that the presidents opening bid is “entitlement reform”, tax reform and spending cuts while the Republicans are saying they’re perfectly happy to let the sequester happen.

Golly, I wonder what a compromise between those two things would look like?

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Sequestration demonstration

by digby

Politico helpfully pimps the GOP negotiating position in the next budget showdown:

Republicans wanted to cut the federal budget — everywhere except the Pentagon. No more.

The reason: A new breed of conservatives in the House cares so much about cutting spending they’re willing to extend that to the budget for bullets and bombs, too — in this case, by letting $500 billion in across-the-board automatic budget cuts over 10 years take effect, alongside a similar number for domestic agencies.

“I’m reading what a lot of different members are saying, and I find there’s not as much opposition to sequestration as I thought there might be,” Rep. Bill Young (R-Fla.), the chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee in charge of the Pentagon’s purse strings, told POLITICO.

“I don’t think I have any real feeling for which direction this House is going, and this is the first time in a long time that I haven’t had a pretty good feel for it,” Young added.

It’s got defense hawks in the House on edge — and on the defensive. But the members of the next generation say their argument is straightforward: Of course they want a strong national defense, but spending is spending.

“What you’re hearing from some folks about the status of the sequester simply tells you that there’s a group of Republicans who are willing to look at the Defense Department equally with the other departments,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a sophomore who has been leading the campaign for spending cuts, including at the Pentagon.

“I think Republicans lose credibility when they say we have to look everywhere for savings except defense,” he added.

Republican Policy Committee Chairman James Lankford of Oklahoma said sequester isn’t his first choice. He’d rather shift cuts to domestic programs, but he knows that’s an idea Senate Democrats aren’t going to swallow.

“I haven’t done the head count, but I can tell you a large part is committed to saying we have to reduce spending. We’d rather do it another way. But if the only way it can be done is sequestration, then it has to be done,” said Lankford, a sophomore who quickly rose to the top ranks of Republican leadership.

I think that’s kind of cute. Of course they are saying they are willing to kill their most important hostage. That’s what terrorists do when they are making their demands. But if they do that, they will be making an enemy of the single most powerful lobby in the Republican Party and a good portion of their own base, which reveres the military.

Neither Party is going to agree to slash defense. It’s possible that the GOP rump freakshow thinks they are willing to do it, but John Boehner and Paul Ryan know very well that it’s not going to happen.

But you do have marvel at how the rhetorical worm has turned in just a couple of years. It wasn’t long ago that you could get attacked in public as a traitor for simply implying that military spending needed to be cut. And, by the way, Democrats, it will be that way again as soon as anything happens to put war back on the menu. (Just look at how they attempted to gin up Benghazi into a symbol of Democratic fecklessness on foreign policy.)

On the other hand, I don’t think you can let the Democrats off the hook. It would be pretty to think they would form a coalition with the nutballs to cut defense spending. But unless we also think it’s a great idea to eliminate the Center for Disease Control and the Forest Service and the FAA, it’s not going to be a good deal for the country. Not only that, most Democrats wouldn’t do it on the merits. They’ve spent too many years working to be seen as just as tough as the Republicans on defense (not to mention all the corrupt contractor dollars they crave.) Even if they could do it, the pressure would be immense from every direction not to.

The congress needs to repeal the sequester and pretend like it never happened. It was just a stupid, temporary face-saving exercise from the disastrous budget negotiations of 2011. It’s not “real” and the pretense that it is becomes more ridiculous every day. Witness the Tea Partiers: if they are serious about it you know it must be absurd.

Update: Also too, this. It’s almost embarrassing.

Update II:

The president is gong to offer a short term replacement for the sequester today:

Obama will ask for a targeted way to reduce the deficit in the short term, perhaps several months. White House officials said that Congress needs more time to work out a 10-year plan worth more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction. Obama is not placing a time span or a dollar amount on the short-term plan. Officials said he will leave that to Congress.

Finding deficit reductions of up to $85 billion would put off the automatic cuts, known as a “sequester” in government budget language, until the start of the new fiscal year.

White House officials say the delay will give Congress and the administration time to negotiate a long-term deal through the regular legislative budget process.

Looks like we’re going to kill government by a thousand cuts.

Not sure that this is wise, considering the economy doesn’t exactly show a lot of energy. But hey, maybe the green shoot are finally showing and we can afford to “pivot” to more deficit reduction right now. It worked so well before.

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States’ rights, same now as it ever was

by David Atkins

Chuck Grassley, in a Times article on efforts to reduce waiting times at voting locations:

But getting anything passed without Republican support will be impossible, Democrats acknowledge. And so far, conservatives have complained that Democrats are politicizing an issue that should be handled by the states, not the federal government.

“It’s ridiculous to stand in line a couple of hours to vote,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “But I think it’s also ridiculous to make a political issue out of it when it’s very easily handled.”

Where have we heard this “don’t politicize states’ rights issues” business before? It wouldn’t have anything to do with race, would it?

Well, as a matter of fact:

The average wait nationwide was 14 minutes last year, according to Mr. Stewart’s data. Blacks and Hispanics waited an average of 20.2 minutes, compared with 12.7 minutes for whites. In the most populous areas — those with more than 500,000 voters in a county — the average wait was 18 minutes, more than double what it was in counties with fewer than 50,000 voters.

Yeah, it’s about race. Whenever anyone trots out the “states’ rights” canard, it’s always important to figure out which traditionally oppressed group the good ol’ boys are trying to keep down this week.

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