Quick Hits

Just to get me through the weekend:

• John Edwards' hiring of Joe Trippi seems like a smart move by his campaign, but considering that Edwards was reportedly staffed up on consultants, I can't help but think that this is more of a public relations move to get the netroots on his side by hiring the hero of the Dean campaign. Still, the fact that a candidate is reaching out to the netroots at all is progress in this Presidential race.

• The House has been quietly moving forward on a variety of bills, including representation for DC residents in Congress and allowing shareholders a say in executive compensation packages. While completely reasonable (the DC bill is balanced by an extra seat for Utah, which will get one in 2010 anyway), it'll be a struggle for both these bills in the Senate. Man, we need some more friendly Senators and a Democratic President in 2008.

• It's absolutely disgusting that a known terrorist was set free from an American jail, solely because he's the RIGHT kind of terrorist - an anti-Cuban one. Luis Posada Carriles blew up an Air Cubana flight in Barbados in 1976, with the tacit support of the CIA. His whole dirty dossier is at the link.

• Somalia, the "big success" in the war on terror, is still a horror show. Over 300,000 people have fled the capital and it's rapidly becoming a humanitarian crisis. Speaking of which, I saw an hourlong committee hearing about Darfur on C-SPAN yesterday. It occurs to me that cable news is entirely useless on giving any kind of national or global perspective. As a result, the world has dithered for years on Darfur while hundreds of thousands die. Next week begins several days of global action at Save Darfur.

• Reasonable conservative Jon Swift was funnier than I was about Alberto Gonzales' memory loss.

• Charging drivers to enter congested areas in Manhattan sounds crazy, but as an environmental initiative it's pretty bold. New York is hardly the problem with regard to greenhouse gas emissions; in fact, on a per capita basis it's the greenest city in America, mainly because most people DON'T have cars. Apparently there is a 20-year history to this legislation, which is in place in central London.

• I missed out on writing about the Pulitzer Prizes. Charlie Savage's Boston Globe reporting on signing statements was extremely worthy of the honor. Why a reporter from Boston had to reveal this Washington issue should be of some consternation to the Washington Post.

• Hugo Chavez is putting a Zeppelin in the sky over Caracas, equipped with a camera to monitor street crime. But I agree with this comment at Unqualified Offerings: "Now they need to arm them, hang biplanes from them or pack them full of monkeys. Or pack them full of armed biplane-piloting monkeys."

• According to a report, "The French knew in 2001" that al Qaeda was plotting hijackings of aircraft within the United States, delivering 9 reports to US intelligence services.

• If you want a legal analysis of Gonzales v. Carhart, there's this from Yale law professor Jack Balkin. An excerpt:

The second point worth noting is that Justice Kennedy invokes what has become the new rhetoric of abortion opponents-- the notion that women often regret abortions and that they are deceived by doctors into having them... The new anti-abortion rhetoric attempts to demonstrate that few women in their right minds, who really understand what abortion involved, would defy their natural love for their children and consent to an abortion, much less seek to procure one. It tries to perform a rhetorical jujitsu move on the idea of choice, by suggesting-- without any empirical evidence, that women don't really choose abortions, and that to have an abortion is actually a violation of their "true" choices...

In fact, the argument about mother love seems to be a makeweight; it seems to involve the claim that Congress knows better than women do about what they would choose in certain situations. The law forecloses choice rather than informing it. As Justice Ginsburg points out in her dissent, this is the very sort of paternalism about women ability to make decisions about their reproductive lives that the right to abortion seeks to counter. Justice Kennedy's use of this new form of anti-abortion rhetoric reveals that this particular line of opposition to abortion, at least, is premised on the notion that women don't really know or really understand what they want when they seek abortions.

• "The tax burden in the U.S. is shifting away from the rich, to the point where in a few years it could change from being progressive to effectively flat, a new study says." Sorry, I'm playing class warfare. By quoting the Wall Street Journal.

• And finally, "I am the lizard king! I can do anything! Even get pardoned for a 37 year-old incident!" Seriously, Gov. Charlie Crist might be my new favorite Republican. He's not an action hero, but if the national media wanted to find a REAL post-partisan figure, it'd be Crist.