Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

They were playing politics with Cesar Chavez's birthday yesterday, Hillary Clinton issuing a statement praising him and Barack Obama trying to one-up her by supporting the effort to make the birthday a national holiday. (Eight states recognize it now.)

Chavez would have been embarrassed by the fuss. A truly modest man, he worked tirelessly to improve the lives of migrant workers and, like Martin Luther King, was inspired by the selfless non-violence of Gandhi. At the age of 60, he fasted for over a month to protest the use of pesticides.

In the 1960s, nobody I knew would buy or eat grapes to support his efforts to get decent pay and working conditions for the people who picked them in California. Using his memory now to court Latino voters is particularly sad in the light of Chavez's own view of life and politics.

"When we are really being honest with ourselves," he said, "we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us, so it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are."

-- ROBERT STEIN

[Attorney General Mukasey’s] argument means that government officials must be free to break the law in a classified intelligence setting with impunity, because we can't risk subjecting them to a court of law since, presumably, we can't trust our country's federal judges with classified information and so it's preferable to allow lawbreaking by our highest government officials. That's a pretty extraordinary -- and pretty reprehensible -- argument for a former federal judge and current Attorney General to be making.

-- GLENN GREENWALD

In the aftermath of the summer 2004 Florida hurricane season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) distributed $1.2 billion in disaster aid to Florida residents. This research presents two empirical findings that collectively suggest the Bush administration engaged in vote buying behavior. First, by tracking the geographic location of each aid recipient, the data reveal that FEMA treated applicants from Republican neighborhoods much more favorably than those from Democratic or moderate neighborhoods, even conditioning on hurricane severity, home value, and demographic factors. Second, I compare precinct-level vote counts from the post-hurricane (November 2004) and pre-hurricane (November 2002) elections to measure the effect of FEMA aid on Bush’s vote share. Using a two-stage least squares estimator, this analysis reveals that core Republican voters are easily swayed by FEMA aid - $16,800 buys one additional vote for Bush - while Democrats and moderates are not. Collectively, these results suggest the Bush administration maximized its 2004 vote share by concentrating FEMA disaster aid among core Republicans.

-- JOWEI CHEN

The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major [weapons] systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average.

-- DANA HEDGPETH

Barack Obama has claimed that he owes his "very existence" to the Kennedys, because, in his telling, the legendary family provided the student scholarship money that enabled his future father to visit America in 1959 and meet his future mother. Turns out, however, that the Kennedys didn't kick in money for that particular program, which involved the airlifting of Kenyan students, until 1960.

The Obama campaign came clean yesterday. Unlike Hillary on the Bosnia falsehood, at least Obama didn't try to blame it on sleep deprivation.

-- DICK POLMAN

Here's how to think about the proposed reform of financial oversight unveiled by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Monday: The Federal Reserve Bank, whose job already includes regulating a large component of the financial system, has failed pretty badly at its tasks. The proposed solution—to give it more responsibility—seems ridiculous and hazardous.

. . . Given this, it might be construed as a blessing that Paulson's proposed reforms seem unlikely to be enacted anytime soon. On Monday, Paulson said: "These long-term ideas require thoughtful discussion and will not be resolved this month or even this year."

Well, he's right about that. All of the plan's suggestions are cosmetic. Instead, let's please have a serious discussion about the nature of the banking system structure itself: its complexity, its responsibility, and the proper role of the federal government in regulating it. The United States has had such a debate before, leading up to the landmark 1933 Glass Steagall Act. We can and should have such a sweeping debate again.

-- NOMI PRINS

I don’t like, and generally try not to use, the word isolationist, because the word is pretty much meaningless and leads to all sorts of misunderstandings. The word isolationist is inherently pejorative and is an extremely loaded term, and moreover there are not actually any real isolationists yesterday, today or at any other time. These figures are the bogeys of progressive globalists. They are to domestic foreign and trade policy debate what “Nazi” and “fascist” are to descriptions of foreign governments targeted by Washington: convenient props to be used to justify current policy and tar opponents with words with strong negative associations. Like these latter attacks on foreign governments, the terms ”protectionist” and “isolationist” reflect the time warp and warped sense of history that progressive globalists of both parties share, in which it is perpetually the 1930s, the next Hitler is always on the rise and they must, like FDR and Churchill, boldly resist their domestic foes to prevent catastrophe, yadda yadda yadda.

-- DANIEL LARISON

After suffering the worst sales decline in nearly 60 years in 2007, American newspapers could be heading to an even deeper drop in 2008, based on the industry's performance in the early months of this year.

-- ALAN MUTTER

When are Buddhist monks allowed to get violent? When it's for a compassionate cause. Monks and nuns in Tibet take at least two, and sometimes three, sets of vows that constrain their behavior. For most violations, the penalty is usually a confession that the act was committed. But if a monk were to kill another human being—one of the most serious violations of the Pratimoksha vows—he would be liable to expulsion from the monastery. That being said, there is a tradition in Tibetan mythology that could be used to justify taking violent action against an oppressor. The ninth-century king Langdarma, a follower of the Bön tradition, is popularly believed to have persecuted Buddhists during his reign. A monk assassinated him on the grounds that, by killing Langdarma, the monk was acting compassionately toward the tyrant—taking bad karma upon himself in order to spare the king from accumulating the same through his despotic actions.

-- NINA SHEN RASTOGI