MSNBC transcripts

For some reason, MSNBC hides its transcripts--seriously, last week I spent over ten minutes trying to find the transcript for a Rachel Maddow show, both through MSNBC's own search and through the Google. But a commenter over at The Sideshow pointed to the "Read Transcripts of Previous Shows" page, which seems to be reasonably comprehensive. (In most cases, I much prefer transcripts of talking head shows to watching or listening to them. I spend enough time in front of the computer, I'd rather print out and read such things on my daybed or on the train.)

So, there it is. MSNBC transcripts.

Bruce Baugh on the current financial straits

bruceb used to be one of the people I thought of as a sane libertarian. Now he's not a libertarian at all, and here's a one-paragraph precis of exactly why:

When I was younger, I read Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. I liked it. Still do. But I used to think that Sinclair had erred grievously in presenting with obvious approval the opposition leadership calling for what I'd call "social democacy" these days, with a lot more restraints on capital and a much, much more socially active state. Now I see that I was the one who erred. There is no viable opposition to the socially destructive power of those with large sums of money, extensive networks of economic and social controls, and no morals higher than the pits of hell except the institutions of government directed to helping those in need and the nation as whole so as to make great need less common and funded adequately for the job.

It's hard to stop quoting him with one paragraph; here's where he goes from there:

(Not everyone with great wealth is a malefactor, or even close to it, but they won't police their own. This is the fundamental weak spot in the basic libertarian proposal: there are limits to what outsiders can do to any fairly small and intensely woven community, and when the community in question is the wealthiest, there are abuses that simply will go unchecked unless the entire community leadership commits to a course of virtue and keeps it up in perpetuity. And this does not happen.)

And in a parenthetical at the end of the piece, general advice to those who were wrong:

I'm still paying my dues - learning, keeping my trap shut sometimes when people who had the wisdom and insight not to be so wrong in the first place want to say their piece, and backing those who are spreading clues out into the surrounding society. I have done my apologies and am working on my clean-up.

The whole essay, "The Bailout and Me", is well worth reading as a discussion of how these who view money as a big game to played without rules actively harm people who have no idea they've been drawn into the game. If you don't know Bruce, useful background is that he is chronically ill with a number of ailments which keep him from holding a regular job. When he can work, he writes novels and role-playing games, including the award-winning Adventure!.

[ETA: Re-reading my post, it sounds like I think this conversion away from libertarian into social democrat is a recent thing. I'm aware it's not. My main intent was to get people to read a sensible social democrat's essay about the current financial crisis and how it affects the people who are poorly supported by the social safety net.]

36 Questions for You You You

esmeraldus_neo posted this under the ever-useful title "enabling my friends to avoid work since forever" and I'm finally getting around to answering. Feel free to give your own responses in comments, or on your own lj addressed to me, or in writing using a #2 pencil on college-rule paper only. Spelling counts. This will go down on your permanent record. My own answers to the generic questions will be posted in a comment.

( The cut of a thousands cuts )

Okay, it amused me

I think you have to be a role-playing game junkie and a devoted reader of either The Poor Man or Eschaton to enjoy this typo as much as I did. But I laughed and laughed and laughed.

From an eBay listing:

RUNEQUEST SHADOWS ON THE BRODERLAND

What's my favorite mint?

Im-peach-mint.

I realize that the calm, cool, collected Wise Men who have deigned to become the new government will never, ever follow through on this, but:

Impeachment and conviction of federal officials is not limited to the time that they are in office. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rice, Card, Libby, Addington, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Mukasey, Paulson--they can all be impeached and convicted even after January 20. (Greenspan I'm not so sure of, but boy, he deserves it good and hard too.)

It's would be a huge gesture of tremendous symbolic import, yes, but it's not just possible, it's useful. Impeachment and conviction aren't just empty gestures.

Impeachment and conviction could open the path to federal criminal indictment. Executive privilege is sharply curtailed in impeachment cases, so this might be the only way to get certain types of information out of the smoldering ruins of the Bush White House. And practically, one of the penalties of conviction is that the convict is barred from holding federal office in the future. Several of those most at the heart of the Bush/Cheney criminal conspiracy are still young enough that they might aspire to return to public office, and they must be completely repudiated.

If Bush gives out pardons as he is expected to, impeachment is the only path we, the American people, will have to find out what has been done, by whom, and to hold them accountable.

(Of course, as a number of people have observed, if Bush pardons people for any theoretical war crimes, that opens them up explicitly to trial at the International Criminal Court, which can only step in once the malefactors' home nation has proven its unwillingness or inability to prosecute under its own laws. Impeachment would be like hanging a sign saying, "These are your targets.")

It will never happen, of course. I'm nearly certain that a major point of the wireless surveillance program was to gather blackmail data on members of Congress. (I mean, c'mon, do you think for an instant that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, given unlimited computing power and the cooperation of almost every US telephony company, would pause even for three seconds before ordering the NSA to datamine the Senate?)

Still: