Liberal thought and opinion

• Ron Moreau of Newsweek takes a realistic look at Western plans to bribe the Taliban, which has no intention of quitting its war.
• Norman Ornstein of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute writes that the "Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president".
• Howard Gleckman of the Urban Institute argues that the health care bill under consideration in the U.S. Congress would be more attractive to Republicans than Democrats were it not for the partisan politics involved.
• Anti-semitic propaganda creeps its way into Yahoo's weather service.
• Republican anti-tax rhetoric has led the city of Colorado Springs to reduce basic services.
• Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek report that U.S. Justice Department report condemning torture proponents Jay Bybee and John Yoo was edited by Justice official David Margolis to be less critical of them, allowing Bybee and Yoo to avoid sanctions from the Bar Assoication.
• The Greensboro lunch counter sit-in was 50 years ago on February 1, 1960.

• The U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional for the government to restrict the political activity of corporations. Findlaw has the full decision. In reporting this, Keith Olbermann of the Microsoft National Broadcasting Company called for a violent revolution but decried the fact that guns and ammunition are in corporate hands.
• Rioting has broken out between Christians and Muslims in Jos, Nigeria, the site of deadly riots in 2008. The Independent reports upwards of 500 dead.
• A poll by ABC News suggests over eighty percent of the U.S. public supports medical marijuana, with support for legalization at 46%. This is a significant shift in attitude from previous generations; the admission that Bill Clinton had smoked marijuana once when he was in college thirty years earlier was a significant scandal in 1992.
• The California Supreme Court voided legal limits on the amount of marijuana a medical user is allowed to own.
• Charles Levinson and Margaret Coker of the Wall Street Journal describe al-Qaeda's influence in Yemen.
• Blogger Mick Hartley reports that the North Korean economy is in shambles again and that the state is responding by declaring war against "the class enemies within the socialist society".
• Douglas Mwonzora, a leading Zimbabwean opposition Member of Parliament, faces criminal charges for insulting President Mugabe.
• A Palestinian newspaper reports that Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Israel of using atomic bombs in Gaza. At least one of the two sources is untrustworthy.
• Venezuela accused the United States of causing the Haiti earthquake as a test run for a HAARP attack on Iran. HAARP is a communications tool for bouncing signals from submarines off the upper atmosphere.
• The liberal radio network Air America has declared bankruptcy and stopped operating.
• Right-wing activist Charles Dyer of Oklahoma, known online as July4Patriot, has been charged with child molestation. Related: The police and the Hate Trackers website reporting this have received death threats.
• Some comedy from the Onion: "Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian"
• Jon Stewart of the Daily Show mocks Keith Olbermann's rhetorical excesses.

• The U.N. International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala found that Rodrigo Rosenberg hired assassins to kill himself. Rosenberg is the lawyer who recorded a video before his death blaming President Colom for his assassination.
• National Geographic Magazine has a feature on the success of Singapore as a managed economy and a controlled society.
• The New York Times writes about Michael Hicks, a 8-year-old boy who has been on the Transportation and Security Administration's list of terrorism suspects since shortly after his birth.
• Oklahoma legislator Lewis Moore has presented a bill to recognize that the United States federal government has no legal authority to regulate firearms which are not used in interstate commerce. The argument is based on the peculiarity of the U.S. federal system in which all the powers that the federal government is allowed to have are listed in the Constitution, and everything else is supposed to be left to the states. The same argument could be made for legalizing drugs or eliminating the Food and Drug Administration and most of the Environmental Protection Agency.
• Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh outdo themselves with contemptible reactions to the earthquake in Haiti.
• A U.S. soldier has been charged with possessing child pornography after his mother sent him pictures of a 4-year-old family friend in a swimsuit, according to the soldier's family, which raises the question of how this compares to a Coppertone ad.
• An eleven-year-old student in California made the mistake of being smarter than usual and learning about electronics; "authorities" recommend that the student and his parents get counseling.
• Cory Doctorow notes the tenth anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which sought to change the nature of business-customer relations.

We have learned from history that governments which do not deserve public support will often stay in power by playing on the public's fears. National unity is maintained through frightening the public by inventing threats where none exist or inflating actual threats to demonic bogeymen. As such fear-mongering can drive a society to discard rationality and dismantle its own law and order, a good rule is to be more afraid of the leaders that use such tactics than of their enemies.

The latest trend in the United States is now the expectation, the insistence that the government must scare us in this way or it is failing to do its job. This idea is being pushed by a Republican Party that thinks it found a way to charge President Obama with weakness on security and by a mainstream media that is eager to give credence to the Republican Party line. The Republicans say that it is suspicious, if not treasonous, for Obama not to have given a significant public address after the recent failure by al-Qaeda to bomb an airplane. All that the event truly required from the President was perhaps a half hour of his attention for a few agency staffers to explain to him what they are already doing in response to the situation. For political reasons only Obama has been pressured into giving such an address, the language of which can now be picked apart for further attacks on him.

The Parliament of Uganda is considering a bill to give the death penalty to homosexuals. As notable as this is in itself, it is notable how the Ugandan bill was influenced by the American Christian right. This bill is a result of American ideals being imported into Africa, and the evidence is in the rhetoric surrounding it. The bill's sponsor redirects the subject to child molestation; the association of homosexuality with child molestation is an American, Republican Party talking point that has no basis in reality in America or likely in Uganda either. The bill mentions H.I.V.; the association of homosexuality with H.I.V. is an American phenomenon. In Africa, H.I.V. numbers follow population trends. This Ugandan bill expresses the American right's ideals in pure form not watered down by the fear of losing power due to public opposition to what they really stand for. Since we are talking about oppressing and killing people because of how they were born, this is one of those cases where comparisons to the Nazis are perfectly appropriate.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has been covering the story but hardly anyone else has. There is a report of a similar bill in Rwanda.

The Philippine province of Maguindanao on Mindanao island was this November the place of a horrific act of terrorism, and by all accounts it had nothing to do with the well-known terrorist groups in Mindanao.

A saying goes that all politics is local, and here we have an extreme form of that. The Philippines are a republic, but in Maguindanao the true form of government was a dictatorship of the Ampatuan family. Esmael Mangudadatu, a member of another family, had sought to challenge an Ampatuan for the post of Governor in the upcoming elections. As Mangudadatu's relatives drove into the town of Ampatuan -- the name is not a coincidence -- to submit his papers to run for the post, Ampatuan soldiers stopped their cars and killed everybody: relatives, lawyers, over 20 journalists covering the campaign, and another carful of people that were just passing by.

One of the striking aspects of the case is the close involvement of the official Maguindanao government in executing the massacre. Reports have stated the presence of uniformed police, and government equipment and employees were used to dig a ditch to hide the victims and their vehicles. A large number of people knew what was happening and went along with it regardless of any personal reservations they may have had.

The Phillipines government has responded by declaring martial law in Maguindanao and moving people in to replace the local government. As bad as martial law is, martial law under a republic is better than living under the rule of despotism. The situation can be improved from there, and hopefully will be. Without Manila's actions to seize control of the area, it is highly unlikely that the attackers would ever meet justice, especially as the attackers were the local authorities.

We can take a few warnings from this incident, mostly rewordings of old wisdom. We see that the concentration of wealth and power in a single entity, in this case the Ampatuan family, can allow that entity to become more powerful than the official law and order, to the point that its laws are the ones people are made to follow and not the official ones. Without popular vigilance and respect for the rule of law, not men, restraints on a government's power can disappear; and this can happen at any level of government, even if other parts of the government are healthy; and when there is such a concentration of power, the difference between the government and a private party may vanish.

We should also be aware that this was not the year's worst terrorist attack. There have been deadlier attacks in Iraq and Pakistan.

In international law, the doctrine of proportionality holds that an army's use of force must be relative to the means that would normally be necessary to achieve a military objective given the resources that an army has available. In short, proportionality restricts (but does not forbid) the use of blockbusters, carpet bombing, and nuclear weapons against single targets in cities. As much of the doctrine of proportionality is duplicated in other laws restricting the use of weapons against cities, and as wars since World War 2 have been fought with smaller and/or more accurate weapons that make large scale acts unnecessary, proportionality has not been an issue.