A great Dylan song, well-covered by the master of re-interpreting songs, Cat Power:

“Astonishingly, Robert De Niro, the star of Righteous Kill, Meet The Fockers, Hide & Seek, Godsend, and What Just Happened was once considered one of our finest actors. It’s true! He even won two Academy Awards!”
– The A.V. Club

Kate Dailey has a good roundup of responses to the common arguments trotted out by the folks who are shocked and horrified that Roman Polanski might face jail time for raping a child. Here’s a good snippet:

The crime was 30 years ago! He’s been living on the run ever since. Hasn’t he been punished enough?

Punished how? By his gorgeous Paris apartment and his jet-setting European lifestyle and his long and illustrious career? Apparently so:

See, you or I might think that not going back to the U.S. or U.K. is an action Polanski took in order to make sure that, having raped a minor and fled the country, he would not be rearrested. But you or I would be wrong. In fact these are punishments that Polanski has suffered. (Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber)

Polanski was living a life of his own choosing for the past 30 years. He chose to leave the country. He chose to stay out of the country. That’s not a punishment.

Read the whole thing.

And for those wondering why I’ve spent so much time on this, it’s pretty simple. There are two things about the Justice System that I particularly deplore. One is its willingness to turn a blind eye to prosecutorial and police misconduct in order to score a conviction–regardless of the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Second is its willingness to allow the rich and the powerful to get away with their crimes, scot free, without a shred of remorse.

Both of these things are in desperate need of change. The Justice System is–very slowly–starting to turn around on the former. Not so much on the latter, but the Polanski case might help to change that. I want more prosecutions of the powerful for their crimes, and if Polanski is successfully extradited then it might start a turnaround there, too.

This is simply incredible.

With no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William continued his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from the small library at the elementary school in his village. One day, when William was 14, he went to the library searching for an English-Chichewa dictionary to find out what the English word “grapes” meant, and came across a fifth-grade science book called Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William wrote, “The book has since changed my life.”

Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. “A windmill meant more than just power,” he wrote, “it was freedom.”

For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it’s another thing altogether. It’s nothing short of monumental.

Read the whole thing.

Andrew Sullivan makes a point that both he and I have made before, but bears repeating:

You will never hear a neocon talk about the expense of empire or the burden of imperial debt. The neoconservative outlook focuses on the internal nature of foreign regimes, but it refuses to look at the internal financial collapse of contemporary America.

Neocons favor more defense spending, period. I do not recall a single recent instance in which they did not want to project military power, regardless of its expense. There have been no conservative worries about the cost of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, even as they fulminate against big government spending. To ask the question of why American tax-payers are still financing the defense of Germany, for example, is to commit heresy (I exclude Ron Paul from all this, of course). And yet if we know one thing from history it is that empires crumble from a function of mounting debt, often caused by unnecessary or hubristic wars. If today’s astounding debt - created in large part by Republican tax cuts, war, failure to rein in entitlements or regulate the financial industry sufficiently - does not wake them up, what will?

By a mile and a half, “defense” spending is the largest portion of America’s discretionary budget. (In second place? Interest on the debt.) We cannot realistically cut deficits and pay down debt unless we face the beast that is “defense” spending and start being rational about the military role that America should take.

I put “defense” in quotes, of course, because a substantial portion of dollars spent has nothing to do with the primary purpose of the military, which is to repel foreign invasion. The United States spends more money on its military than every other country in the world. Combined. We could cut defense spending in half and we’d still be spending more than all of the European Union countries. Combined.

Now look at it this way. The United States’ military budget is $636,292,979,000. Now, think about the “grave threats to our security” that neoconservatives are always rambling about–and realize that they spend a tiny percentage of this amount on their militaries:

Russia - $39,600,000,000
China - $70,308,600,000
North Korea - $5,500,000,000
Iran - $2,500,000,000
Venezuela - $4,000,000,000

In other words, we could cut military spending in half and we’d still be spending about three times as much as our “major threats” combined.

If we’re able to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan successfully, there’s no reason why we can’t start a program to start winding down our defense spending to a more manageable level without sacrificing the security of the United States. I think that a 50% cut over, oh, say, 10-15 years is a reasonable goal. We really can’t afford to keep spending so much on the military.

“We live in a country where, during a death row case, a judge and a prosecutor neglected to inform anyone that they’d been screwing for years. We live in a country where an innocent man was murdered by the state on the basis of hoodoo science. And people are obsessing over some dude who raped a kid?”
– Ta-Nahesi Coates

This post by Daniel Larison comparing Obama’s and Bush’s foreign policies is close to dead on:

What conservative critics ignore and what Andrew only touches on towards the end is that the Bush administration oversaw setback after failure after defeat for American influence and power. Iran has become a far more influential regional power thanks to the folly of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, democracy fetishists helped to strengthen the hold of Hamas in Gaza to the detriment of Palestinians and Israelis, and Russophobes helped to encourage Saakashvili’s recklessness with talk of NATO membershop and provoked Russian ire with the recognition of Kosovo that led to the de facto permanent partition of an American ally. Hawks have routinely unleashed forces they do not understand, cannot control and are unwilling to contain, and they still have the gall to shout “Appeasement!” when someone else tries to repair some small measure of the damage they have done. Compared to this partial list of Bush’s major failures, Obama has done reasonably well simply by not persisting in some of his predecessor’s errors, but it is far too early to speak of success or payoff and it is a mistake to measure Obama’s success in the way that his supporters wish to do.

Read the whole thing.

“”The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche