Lemkin

How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. America’s current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix—-all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use—-all of the Cold War players, major and minor […]. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear “ahead,” even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless.

jonathan-cunningham:

The biggest loser on the network was Bill O’Reilly who saw his program The O’Reilly Factor lose 12% of its total viewers and 21% of its young viewers. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bret Baier, and Greta Van Susteren rounded out the top five cable news shows, and they each posted double digit declines.

My initial thought was “people are just sick of ‘The News’” but uff-da these numbers hurt, and are specific:

Fox News is now averaging 1.831 million prime time viewers a day, and only 443,000 viewers age 25-54.

[…]

While Glenn Beck suffered double digit losses at 5PM, Chris Matthews posted modest gains of 1% overall and 8% in the demo. While Bret Baier declined, Ed Schultz has seen his viewership skyrocket at 6 PM. The Ed Show is up 24% over last year in total viewers and 8% in the demo. Keith Olbermann’s Countdown was down over last year by 6% in total viewers and 19% in the demo, but Olbermann’s was the only cable news show to gain audience since the second quarter. Rachel Maddow gained 6% in total views, but lost 1% with the demo.

Now, obviously, some of that is that msnbc has more room to grow (an odd converse to the situation The Democrat faces in the Congress, actually)…but still. The line item that’s got to shiver the timbers of one Rupert Murdoch (who, far from being any sort of true believer, simply puts up with whatever the message is so long as it makes a nice bottom line) is that demo analysis…only ~25% of your viewership is under 55? That’s what you’re selling to advertisers? Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph I may yet live to see the end of that particular brand of “discourse”…

jonathan-cunningham:

At this point, I didn’t believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record.  In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims.  That’s not surprising:  both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality.  But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”:  in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

I never thought I could seriously type the title above.  It sounds crazy right?  The President running an assassination program where he can, without judicial or legislative oversight, kill any US citizen.  If Greenwald didn’t link to the legal document above, I wouldn’t have believed it.  Nothing can be done so long as the court sees it as a “state secret” so the only recourse is to elect another President in 2012.

Except that “electing another President” won’t help either. Implicit in the election of Obama (or any Democrat who ran in 2008, for that matter) was the notion that, leaving aside every other possible policy decision that might come up in their term, said Democrat would be working to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush/Cheney “Security State.” That this has not happened is an understatement. From what I can see, the Obama administration has largely embraced and extended the Bush/Cheney security state.
Electing “another President” won’t help either. Your choices come 2012 are going to be a) Obama (again, forgetting everything else that has happened by 2012: on the essential freedoms that were formerly implicit to citizenship he is a failure thus far and shows no sign of changing) or b) Palin/Romney/Pawlenty/whoever. Do you really think anyone the GOP runs is going to be to the left of Obama on basic freedoms and the rights of a citizen? I, for one, do not. Because, honestly, there is no way they let any Democrat seize the security state thing from them. It won’t even come up if they think they can’t get sufficiently far to the right of him.

One can only conclude that these policies are then, for all intents and purposes, permanent. You get one chance to roll them back: when the next person comes in. And Obama’s administration has decided they like them just fine. It would be one thing to charge and try Awlaki in absentia, and then issue the orders as something along the lines of “look, he’s a convicted criminal in a war zone; we’re bringing him to justice; he may well die in that effort, but we hope to bring him to face his sentence.” There are very few people who would argue with such a truly conservative approach. Instead: no charges, no trial, everything made a “state secret,” and not even a passing effort made at even implying that there’s a real, legal case that even can be made against this guy. He’s delivered some strident sermons. That’s the full case against him in five words. On those grounds, the future GOP-in-charge could choose to round up Jeremiah Wright. Is that a country we want to live in?

And yet the Tea Klan screams tyranny because they are still going to buy their health insurance from a private company come 2014 and the top marginal rates might rise slightly. Indeed they have their fingers on the pulse of The Founders’ deepest wishes.

Jay Rosen, chair of the Journalism Institute at NYU, recalls the auld tale of how and why he didn’t end up working as a journalist:

In April I was supposed to contact [Buffalo Courier-Express editor] Doug Turner about a starting date. I did so by calling his office. He wasn’t in and didn’t return my call. I called him again. No call back. I called him a third time. Nothing. Thinking he was too busy to answer his phone, I wrote him a note. He didn’t reply to my note. I wrote him a second note. Again, no reply. Now it’s mid-May and I have graduated from college. Turner ignored my third note, too. But why? In my desperation and confusion I went down to the newspaper and headed straight to his office.

“Do you remember me? You wanted me to quit school and come to work for you. You promised me a job after graduation. Now you won’t even talk to me… What is going on here?”

Turner wouldn’t look directly at me. He said, “There’s an explanation, but you’ll have to sue me to find out.” Then he picked up the phone and had the security guard escort me from the building.

[…]

A few years later, through a friend who had a friend who worked at the Courier-Express, the mystery was solved. My case was a newsroom legend. It turns out that the job I had [separately] applied for, “Northeast Daily: General Assignment Reporter…” was for an opening at the Courier-Express. Yes. But I didn’t know this because in the standard format for those ads the newspaper was never named. You applied to a box number. The employer was described vaguely. What you were supposed to do is write on the envelope, “Do not forward to the Dayton Daily News” if you worked at the Dayton Daily News and didn’t want your boss to know you were on the prowl for something better. But I didn’t know any of that.

Not only had I stupidly applied to the newspaper that had already offered me a job, but it was my job they were advertising in Editor and Publisher! Yes. Turner had to post the opening to fulfill legal requirements; in reality he had reserved that slot for me [based on a prior verbal agreement]. When he got my application he obviously considered it an act of disloyalty, and that’s why he ceased all communication. So I lost my job by applying for my job.

and then, as if that’s not enough of a story, he gets this quote from the editor in question, whose memory of these long-ago events is spotty:

We’re both aware fortunately that the events you describe happened more than 30 years ago. I wish that my recollection of my conversations with interns such as yourself was as firm as those with whom I worked closely for a year or two. Yet “sue me for it” does sound like me in those days.

Priceless.
And I have to disagree, Jay: you are one hell of a journalist. You just don’t play one professionally.