Author: Jonathan

I’ve had a soft spot for Jesse Ventura since, while visiting family in Minnesota, I listened to his pre-election gubernatorial debates. This via Glenn Greenwald.

[JESSE] VENTURA: I don’t watch much TV. This year’s reading, I covered Bush’s life. I covered Guantanamo and a few other subjects. And I’m very disturbed about it. I’m bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we’ve created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that? I have a problem. I will criticize President Obama on this level; it’s a good thing I’m not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.

[LARRY] KING: You were a Navy SEAL.

VENTURA: That’s right. I was water boarded, so I know — at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence – every one of us was waterboarded. It is torture.

KING: What was it like?

VENTURA: It’s drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you — I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

Greenwald comments:

Let’s just repeat that: “I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.” That is the crux of the case for investigations and prosecutions. That’s it.

Here’s a fragment from a post by Richard Posner at his blog.

Is the Conservative Movement Losing Steam?

… By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of “originalism,” the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004.

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation. …

Good news from Dean Baker? Twice in one post? Indeed.

Health Care and Student Loans: The Bad Guys Are on the Run

Progressives should be feeling good right now. There is clear evidence that we are winning on two really big issues.

Starting with the smaller of the two, Sallie Mae, the largest private issuer of student loans, is now proposing to accept a plan in which the government is the sole issuer of government guaranteed loans. Sallie Mae’s plan is that it continue to be given the opportunity to originate these loans, picking up fees in the process.

This proposal is in response to the Obama administration’s plan to get the private sector out of the government guaranteed loan business. There is ample evidence that the involvement of private firms just adds costs — approximately $90 billion over ten years according to the Congressional Budget Office. Sallie Mae’s compromise proposal is a recognition of the fact that it cannot stop the Obama plan.

If this story is good, the news on health care is even better. The industry is now proposing a scheme whereby it will curtail cost growth by 1.5 percentage points a year. At these point none of the details of the proposal are public and it is unlikely that any of the commitments in the proposal will be binding in any serious way on the industry.

However, the fact that they would suggest that such cost savings are possible is an enormous concession. After 10 years, the cumulative savings from this proposal would amount to more than $400 billion a year, more than $3,000 for every family in the country.

The industry is talking this way because they are scared to death at the prospect of having a Medicare type public plan, which will both provide competition for private insurers and create an effective mechanism to constrain the fees charged by health care providers. As many have argued, the public plan is a real game changer.

These new developments in both the health care debate and the debate over student loan policy are great news. In both cases the industry groups are now prepared to make important concessions that they never would have envisioned even a year ago.

Of course, there is no reason to accept their compromises. Why should we waste any of the money that could be going to help college students so that Sallie Mae executives can draw high salaries and its shareholders can enjoy large dividends. Let them make money in the market, not by adding costs to a government program.

Similarly, the threat of a public plan has forced promises of concessions from the health care industry. If we don’t actually get the public plan, there is no enforcement mechanism for these promises. If we go ahead and put the public plan in place, then we know that the industry will deliver on its promises.

Now is not the time for compromises. We must keep the pressure on. It is showing results.

—Dean Baker

Makes sense to me.

Term Limits for SCOTUS Justices

Here’s a good four year-old article from Stephen Calabresi and James Lindgren making the case for abolishing life tenure for Supreme Court justices. Their mathematically sensible advice is that justices should serve for a fixed term of 18 years. This is longer than the historical average for the Supreme Court but considerably shorter than the post-1970 average of 25 years.

A new justice would be picked, on schedule, ever two years. This would eliminate the risk of what happened during the Carter administration when nobody died or retired and consequently by 1992 all the justices had been selected by Republicans. It would also formalize the rhetoric around the idea that “elections have consequences” by specifying in advance what those consequences are.

…

It has always seemed to me that Maine’s solution is the obvious one: distinguish between civil and sacramental marriage, and restrict the government’s cognizance of marriage to the civil aspect.