There’s not a lot to add to the debate over torture – and Obama’s transparency thereof – that hasn’t already been repeated ad nauseum in every news outlet, blog, and Twitter feed out there. Myself, I don’t believe torture is always ineffective, nor do I consider it categorically immoral. I nevertheless oppose torture as a routine policy in the war with al-Qaeda because as a general matter al-Qaeda fails to meet the two criteria I consider the threshold for a Western society to invoke torture: that it is at once an imminent and existential threat.

With terrorism, imminence implies specificity of action, so by definition it doesn’t apply to the broader conflict with al-Qaeda where routine detainee policy comes into play. This criterion applies better to our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, where exchange of fire with al-Qaeda is far more quotidian than it is stateside. Information that the government has released in recent weeks are fairly crystal about the violation of this criterion. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for example, was waterboarded 183 times in one month. The only way this was a "ticking time bomb" scenario is if the detonator was flashing noon.

Even an imminent al-Qaeda attack is not necessarily an existential one, but the semantics get trickier. The United States is a large country both in area and population. One could argue the only truly existential threat to the nation as a whole would be one on the order of, say, a substantial meteor, firepower that al-Qaeda has little chance of ever wielding (unless they team up with the Arachnids of Klendathu).

I’m not quite so conservative, though, because I think defining “existential” in this way effectively price discriminates human life by nationality. The pathogen that could wipe out all of Luxembourg – and thus present an existential threat of the gravest sort to the tiny nation – could kill the same number of people in America and, having claimed a fraction of 1% of the population – fail to meet the same existential threshold.

The Luxembourg comparison also exposes the scope problem of “existential:” whose existence? America’s? New York City’s? Lower Manhattan’s? Once you get to the individual level, then almost all terrorism is “existential” by definition. Yet, given how ineffective torture is (again, 183 times in one month is prima facie evidence that something’s not going according to plan), and – this is key basis of torture opponents– given that America’s identity is intertwined with principles that conflict with torture (and I hasten to add that we’ve outlasted more than a few regimes that openly embraced torture),  I am not willing to trade torture for a slight increase in the probability of thwarting a plot to, say, mug one or two people. I would therefore define an “existential” threat as one that promises to upset the functions of a peaceful, well-run society (a definition that would also cover political assassinations, which even when involving just one leader quite definitely involve sowing chaos at the core of a civilization).

Did 9/11 meet these criteria? I think in the preceding few months it did, and so torture in those extraordinary circumstances would have been justified. The bigger question is whether we’ve faced those circumstances again since then. My hunch – and obviously there’s a lot of uncertainty here – is that we very well might have, but nothing I’ve read thus far in the OLC memos has suggested they were operating under the urgency that an speculated imminent and existential threat would elicit. Instead, I’ve been struck by the banal and mundane way the CIA treated torture in the years covered by these memos.

New information could shed more light on the sordid history of torture in this county, and I actually agree with Dick Cheney that at this point we ought to release classified information of the effectiveness of torture. But absent any reliable new revelations that support the efficacy of torture, the abhorrence of the vast majority of what we did is unavoidable.

President Obama unveiled his strategy for high speed rail (HSR) yesterday. Infrastructurist has a good overview of what’s on the table at the national level.

Others who have more expertise in transportation engineering are better sources of the cost-benefit analysis. I will say though that while California’s proposal is expensive, both in aggregate and in unit cost, it’s not the most expensive one being considered worldwide, and much of its expense is driven by the fact that the system will be true HSR and not a “standard speed +” compromise like the Acela Northeast Corridor.

Still, that will be of little comfort to HSR’s critics, most outspoken among them libertarian think tanks like the Reason Foundation and Cato Institute, who argue that HSR is too expensive and America not dense enough to make it feasible. And while I admit the cost, especially California’s proposal, represents a substantial risk in car-obsessed America, I wanted to respond to the density argument, because I think the counterargument is more conclusive.

Yes, taken as a whole, the United States is indeed a relatively low-density industrial country. What this argument ignores, however, is that no one is proposing that high speed rail cris-cross the entire continent. The Department of Transportation’s designated high-speed rail corridors are shown at the left. They were drawn using a number of feasibility criteria, density among them. What the DoT is saying basically is that population conditions are ideal for HSR on the east coast, some sections of the Midwest and Texas, and the west coast, but not the areas in between.. So if your dream was to see the plains of Kansas going 200 mph on the Shinkansen… well, you’re out of luck.

America, however, has several large swaths of area that exceed the density of countries when high speed rail has been an undeniable success. Take California, for instance. If you consider the entire state – which includes the vast, sparsely populated areas of Imperial County and the far north – our density is close to that of France’s, famous for its TGV high speed trains. As the chart to the left shows, if you include only those counties on the proposed San Francisco – San Diego high speed rail line, then the population served lives in areas denser than Germany, where high speed rail has been in place since 1991 and has been a unreserved success.

Critics point out that the InterCityExpress in Germany and Shinkansen in Japan connect to a wider network of regional trains, one which California isn’t proposing to duplicate. I’ll be the first to admit that the RegioBahns in Germany are impressive. But California isn’t quite so backwards: the Bay Area has CalTrain, Muni, and of course BART, LA has an increasingly respectable subway and light rail system, and San Diego has a surprisingly clean and well-run trolley system. Plus, since people are perfectly willing to rent cars at airports, putting a Hertz counter at HSR stations would seem to at least match airports for convenience.

I’ll talk about ridership projections in a future post, but for now, I think the areas where HSR proposals are on the table are on balance the right areas, and if the primary worry is density then I think a cursory glance of places where HSR is well-used proves that these corridors match up population-wise

Over at The Atlantic, Conor Clarke has a helpful rundown of Obama’s proposed tax hikes. Basically, for people making above $250,000, they revert income taxes back to Clinton levels and capital gains taxes back to Reagan levels. Clarke concludes that on taxes, then, the tea parties are a confused and confusing mess.

There are two responses to this. The first is that, while Clinton-era tax rates do not a fascist regime make, it’s fair to say that spending is the more salient issue at these tea parties (and Clarke does briefly acknowledge this). Remember, the whole "movement", and I use that term generously, began as a grass roots tool employed by Ron Paul supporters, long before the Democratic nominee was chosen and the ire of fiscal conservatives was directed against Bush. And I have a hard time believing that their beef with Bush was high taxes.

It needs to be said, too, that herein lies the kernel of truth in these tea party protests, even in their present, Fox/Pajama-sponsored incarnation. The debt is too high, the projected 10-year deficits are unsustainable, and fixing this almost certainly will require higher taxes in the future. Whatever culpability you assign to Obama for this, the fact remains that he’s the president now and is responsible for the situation, and no amount of juvenile "tea-bagging" jokes by Rachel Maddow changes this fact. So far, the signals from the White House haven’t been promising. Obama’s proposed defense budget slows growth and makes some smart tactical decisions but, contrary to what some would have you believe, still increases defense spending by 4% next fiscal year. Meanwhile, his health care plan is touted as saving $300 billion over 10 years. That’s not peanuts, but it’s also not nearly enough to make the government solvent, and based on Obama’s actions so far I’m confident that if cost controls were preventing passage in Congress that fiscal considerations would be jettisoned. The bottom line is that Obama shouldn’t dismiss the merits of the tea parties so easily, because if he does, the politics could come back to haunt him in four years.

By the same token, though, and this is the second reponse to Clarke’s argument, I hope these tea party protestors understand that the Republic is sick of being lectured to about fiscal discipline by the Republican Party. The GOP had their moment to govern, and the GOP-led Congress had their opportunity to stand up for principle. With a few notable exceptions such as Senator Judd Gregg, they chickened out. Americans in general aren’t thrilled about taxes, and my read is that they worry about the debt and aren’t convinced Obama is going to make progress on it. But, like the pearl’s layers of calcium around a single grain of sand, they look at the anti-Obama apparatus that’s grown around these tea parties — birthers, rants about fascism and socialism, Christianism, 24/7 coverage on Fox News — and they see hypocrites who didn’t lift a finger when the big spender had an "R" after his name. Then they look at the President who, at the end of the day, still inherited most of this problem, and they see a leader still worth supporting as the nation’s economy collapses. Hypocrisy may not change the underlying facts, but in regaining the votes of the nation, it’s the biggest obstacle the GOP has in the foreseeable future.

U2 fans don’t listen to much any other music, so the 4+ year hiatus since their last effort has given me a hunger for some jinggly Edge guitar goodness that even the latest Eno-drenched Coldplay album couldn’t satisfy. Not that I know who Coldplay even is, since, again, I only listen to U2. Anyway, luckily for me, some unfortunate intern at Universal Music Australia fell asleep at his computer, forgot to code No Line on the Horizon as “unavailable for download,” and… fast forward 12 hours… U2’s new record has been passed around the world umpteen times and two weeks early. Oops. Hope they go easy on the guy.

Their last album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, had some catchy hooks on it but all in all came across as a half-baked work. Promising songs like “Original of the Species” were ruined by shoddy, unfocused writing. No Line on the Horizon succeeds because their ideas are more fleshed out and focused, even as the band gradually wades into more experimental waters. There’s only one real clunker, “Stand Up Comedy,” which rumor has it took 18 months to write, I can only assume because Bono wanted to break some world record for most platitudes-per-minute. “Get On Your Boots” and “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” are harder calls, the former because it’s non-sensical and the latter because it tetters on the edge of “Stand Up Comedy”’s fate, but they’re both good tunes, so on the iPod they stay. In the category of less-reserved endorsements, “Breathe” somehow manages to be both stream-of-consciousness and U2 par-excellence: it won’t be covered on Idol anytime soon but it’s one of the band’s best deep tracks. The title track was leaked about a week ago in a Buzzcocks-style remix form that was pretty compelling; the final album version is more ambient and half-a-notch better. “Magnificent” isn’t as tightly written as it could have been. but that’s faint criticism for one of the album’s most exciting highlights. And “Moment of Surrender” is no “One” but inexplicably manages to make 7 minutes sound like 4 while being a finely written ballad that gets stuck in your head.

The album also has a couple of more experimental tunes: “Unknown Caller,” which draws on technological imagery and has a lovely opening, and “FEZ - Being Born,” a track that’s actually two melodies stitched togther and works in setting the mood for the album’s second half. U2 also show off two quieter, meditative songs which I haven’t put my head around entirely yet, but which are both undoubtedly growers. “White as Snow” is a Irish-style ballad written from the perspective of a soldier in Afghanistan, and “Cedars of Lebanon” is the album’s spoken-word closer about a journalist in… yes… Lebanon. Neither are stand-alone songs but both are indispensible to the album’s atmosphere.

So on balance, and after two listens, No Line on the Horizon is a very-good-tettering-on-excellent album that as a whole is probably their best since Achtung Baby. I do miss the pop craftsmanship Bono displayed on 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, but the best of those songs were still not much more than inch deep, and they came with a fair number of clunkers like the God awful “Peace on Earth.” NLOTH, meanwhile, is less radio-friendly but more interesting, more consistent, and thus more satisfying. A worthy work of a still-great band.

If there were an award for non-sequiter poseur rants, Ron Rosenbaum would win it for his decade-late take down of Billy Joel. Yes… Billy Joel. At least when Pitchfork works itself into a self-satisfied pretentious frenzy, it’s because they’re reviewing something timely. Billy Joel meanwhile is about as hip as Doonesbury, and I write that as someone who likes Billy Joel.

Now, I’ll grant Rosenbaum 100% of his point about “Always a Woman” being a chisel of “Just Like a Woman,” because that’s always annoyed me too. And when BJ goes for depth, it often ends up platitude instead. But there’s something to be said for craft, and Joel at his best is an excellent craftsman of songs. The stories told in “Piano Man” and “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” are not the most compelling in the world, but they are singularly well-told, much like The Shawshank Redemption. I’m actually inclined to be less generous to Joel’s artistry than Rosenbaum is: I don’t think there’s nearly as much debate about Joel’s work as there is about Andrew Wyeth’s, because I think Joel is more unambiguously pop (with the exception of his brief foray into classical music that met with positive reviews). A more apt musical parallel to Wyeth might be the Beach Boys. But I don’t believe art needs to be innovative or even influential to be valuable: to focus too much on the beauty of the new is to miss the beauty of the familiar, and while I’m hardly a defender of the entire Billy Joel corpus I do see, especially in his earlier, pre-Christie Brinkley songs, a potent, if conventional, narrative and sonic skill.

Oh, and you have to love a guy who covered “To Make You Feel My Love” before it was even released.

I (or, more specifically, Dante) would never survive living in an inordinately rainy climate.

Arena football is canceling its 2009 season. You’d think that with a mini-depression looming, the cheap seats of the local arena club would be a good substitute for NFL tickets priced to be competitive with backstage Madonna passes. My friends and I went to a New Orleans Voodoo match a few months ago and had a blast for what was no more than $15 a seat. Imagine being able to take your whole family to a sporting event more than once every other year! Of course, you sacrifice the communal experience, the feeling that you are bearing live witness to something that a non-trivial number of Americans care about and are watching on TV. Arena football is fun, but there just aren’t a lot of people who care about it.

We’re trying to get the little (big) guy in a preschool program beginning around January. Minimal luck so far. I’ve had two school directors audibly laugh at me for trying to get a mid-year spot. Why so few preschool spots in Berkeley/Albany? It’s not like there’s some preschool cartel trying to prop up prices by limiting supply. While there are accreditation organizations for preschools, there are enough non-accredited preschools perceived to be decent that virtually no one pays attention to accreditation.

My guess is that rents are so high that they crowd out many otherwise-viable preschool business models. Parents are only willing to pay so much to have a stranger watch their kid, even in the Bay Area where incomes are high (though our willingness-to-pay is skyrocketing these days), and teachers are only willing to accept so little  to do so, and have tolerance for only so many children at once. Toss in a disproportionately high business expense like Bay Area rent (where the rent:income ratio is higher than just about anywhere else on Earth), and you’ve just broken the back of more than a few preschools.

Man, preschool rationing sucks. Is this what the Soviet Union was like?

I have nothing at all against Caroline Kennedy personally. She strikes me as a poised, well-adjusted individual not given to the public family drama that often plagues the Kennedy clan. She’s clearly leveraged her personal talent and (considerable) family connections to raise money for a number of eminently-deserving causes that benefit the non-silver-spoonéd public. Whatever else you may say about her experience and her interest in policy, graduating from Columbia Law School is not the path of an intellectual or professional lightweight. And of course, I get that her endorsement of Obama during the primaries, and to a greater extent her persuasion of her Uncle Ted to do the same, was a political windfall for the President-elect that here in a state of being called “reality” will obviously be rewarded in some way.

Still, the idea of appointing Caroline Kennedy to Hillary Clinton’s now-vacant Senate seat, a seat Kennedy almost certainly has every intention of campaigning to keep after the remainder of Clinton’s term is up, reeks of the sort of dynastic politics that Americans ought to avoid not just in appearances, but in principle as well. A lot of this has to do with the advantages of incumbency in American politics: the very fact that Kennedy would be running for reelection in four years confers an almost insurmountable advantage to her, regardless of her job performance. It would be far more small-”d” democratic for Governor Patterson to appoint a caretaker Senator for the last half of Hillary’s term who would promise to step down in 2012, at which point Kennedy could make her case to the people of New York from the vantage point of the Hudson rather than the Potomac (not that she wouldn’t have enormous logistical and brand advantages anyway).

It must also be said that when judged on the criteria of public advocacy for the people of New York, leadership, and intellectual curiosity, Caroline Kennedy is hardly extraordinary: not a dilettante, exactly, but not someone who has distinguished herself on bread-and-butter policy issues or public service the way others have. What issues evoke her passions? How does she work with political rivals? Etc. etc. It just seems to me that judged purely on how much she’ll be able to help her state, too many question marks remain.

And off of that last point, here’s a belief of mine that I know is partially unfair but here goes anyway: that the Republic is healthier in the long run if we are deeply skeptical of even the appearance of political dynasties. In a couple of key ways, Hillary Clinton — by virtue of actually living in the White House for eight years — was more qualified to be President than any other candidate in modern memory; yet, I voted against her in the primaries partially because in my mind, those narrow issues on which she possessed superior qualifications still did not pass the admittedly-higher bar I set for dynastic candidates. The same standard applies to the Doles, the Bushes, the Bidens, the Bayhs… and yes, the Kennedys. That’s not to say that I would never support a Chelsea or a Beau… and it’s nothing against them as people, either. It’s just that democracy is healthiest when it curbs its monarchist impulses and regards bloodlines as minor liabilities rather than major qualifications.

Although I think his tenure as Louisiana Governor hasn’t lived up to his reformist promise so far, Bobby Jindal is one of the most fascinating — and wicked smart — politicians on either side of the aisle. Steering the Republican Party more towards a platform of reform would have been of great benefit to the Republic, even if he’s probably too socially conservative to win the general election absent a massive Obama fail. So it kind of saddens me that he’s decisively taken his hat out the ring for 2012. Ugh, does that mean suffering through a Palin/Romney primary battle in four years?