Morning Clippings: violence, cruelty, and revenge Edition

The Ole Professor's Thought for the Day: We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice - that is, until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.' -Sydney J. Harris, journalist (1917-1986)

Yglesias: The Right’s Anti-Koh Letter

I’d long wondered what, exactly, the “Center for Ethics and Public Policy” is. After reading the letter Dave Weigel found “that John Fonte of the Ethics and Public Policy Center is passing around conservative circles, collecting signatures to oppose the nomination of Harold Koh” I suppose we can see at least part of the answer, namely that they’re applying “ethics” to “public policy” through the advocacy of torture, aggressive war, and impeding efforts to bring war criminals to justice.

The official purpose of the CEPP, though, is to “clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.” Obviously, this is a broader issue than Koh or John Fonte, but as a secular person who thinks there’s a lot of wisdom in traditional Christian ethical thought it always strikes me as very odd that modern-day manifestations of Christian political activism in the United States so often take the form of advocacy for violence, cruelty, and revenge.

Ya Think? From the Times:

As Stocks Surge, Fears Linger About the Economy

By JACK HEALY and ERIC DASH

The sudden turnaround has investors wondering if the markets have bottomed out or if larger problems are being ignored.

rom the Times:

Mugabe Aides Are Said to Use Violence to Gain Amnesty

By CELIA W. DUGGER

President Robert Mugabe’s top lieutenants are trying to force the political opposition to grant them amnesty for past crimes by torturing opposition officials.

Aravosis: Arizona State refuses Obama honorary degree. Says he hasn't accomplished enough in life.

Arizona State University invited President Obama to speak at their commencement, but they've notified the leader of the free world that he won't be getting an honorary degree because, well, you know, it's great that he's the first black president and everything (yes, they noted that he's black), but maybe he could come back after he finishes his term, and if he's accomplished anything significant by then, the president of the Harvard of the desert will be happy to reconsider whether the President of the United States of America has accomplished anything significant in his life.

Now, before anyone thinks this is about racism or anything, it should be noted that Arizona State is happy to bestow honorary degrees on other people of color (or at least non-white color) who have accomplished great things in their lives, like the vice minister of education of communist China. Who I'm sure is a very nice woman, when she's not pimping for a dictatorship that oppresses fifteen percent of the world's entire population.

• John Cole: Smackdown on Hardball

  Wow. I honestly don’t think you would have seen something like this just a few years ago, but Lawrence O’Donnell is all up in Pat Buchanan’s grill in this Hardball segment about the right-wing fauxtrage the past few weeks about Obama visiting Notre Dame:

  Buchanan was left sputtering, and you don’t see that too often. Democrats are definitely feeling as if they are in charge now.

hilzoy: Unified Electronic Medical Records!

More good news:

"President Obama announced plans on Thursday to computerize the medical records of veterans into a unified system, a move that is expected to ease the now-cumbersome process that results in confusion, lost records and bureaucratic delays.

Medical information will flow directly from the military to the Department of Veterans Affairs' health care system. At present, veterans must hand carry their medical records to Veterans Affairs' facilities once they leave active-duty service. The Veterans Affairs system has a backlog of 800,000 disability claims, which means that veterans typically wait six months for decisions on their cases.

The task of creating a unified system will be handled by the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. The undertaking has repeatedly confounded the two agencies in the past, and it remains unclear how long the project will take and how much it will cost. (...)

Mr. Obama also voiced support for a measure that would allow Congress to approve the money for veterans' medical care one year in advance. Congress has been routinely late in passing the bill that finances the Department of Veterans Affairs, a delay that hampers medical care for veterans and makes planning difficult. (...)

Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said that modernizing medical records and allowing the two systems -- military and veterans affairs -- to talk to each other would have a dramatic effect on care.

Recently, Mr. Rieckhoff said, a Veterans Affairs doctor told him he had encountered a soldier with a brain injury, an amputation and a septic leg. The doctor had no idea how the man had been hurt because he did not have a complete file, he said.

"If you are a wounded service member, you have no continuity through the system," Mr. Rieckhoff said on Thursday."

This is really important. In a world in which medical records can be stored electronically, there's no excuse for veterans, especially wounded veterans, having to trudge around taking their files from one office to another. There's even less of an excuse if it delays their getting the care they need.

One of the things I minded about the Bush administration was that they didn't seem at all interested in trying to get government to work better. Unfortunately, this was dwarfed by little things like torture, starting unnecessary wars, and defying the law, but still. Likewise, this was, unfortunately, not at the top of my reasons for supporting Obama, but his legislation always included a lot of good, workmanlike ways of making things work better, and I imagined he'd do the same as President. I'm so glad he is.

Chris in Paris (AmBlog): Federal government places order with Detroit for fuel efficient cars

This is a good move and works for everyone. If Detroit is going to build the right cars that save money and are good for the environment then they ought to be supported. If Chrysler wants to keep rolling out gas guzzlers, let them fail.

President Barack Obama, saying he was committed to a strong U.S. auto industry, announced on Thursday that the government would purchase 17,600 new fuel-efficient vehicles from American automakers by June 1.

Obama said the vehicles, part of the U.S. government fleet, would be purchased from

General Motors, privately held Chrysler and Ford, all of which had an existing contract with the federal government's General Services Administration.

Daily Kos' BarbinMD: Republicans Continue To Lie About Pew Poll

I suppose this should be filed under other breaking news like "the sky is blue," and "grass is green," but I'll say it anyway: Republicans continue to lie about the recent Pew Poll, using it to say things like

Yet no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly. - Karl Rove

But as reported by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line:

Many on the right have grabbed on to the Pew poll’s finding that Obama’s approval rating has a 61-point partisan gap — 27% of Republicans approve, while 88% of Dems do. Pew called the numbers “the most polarized” in decades but didn’t blame Obama.

Pew associate director Dimock, however, says this is a misreading of the poll. Dimock says the divide is driven by long term trends and by the uncommonly enthusiastic reaction to Obama by members of his own party — by what he calls “the way Democrats are reacting to Obama.”

Interestingly, Dimock also said this phenomenon is partly caused by the recent tendency of Republicans to be less charitable towards new Presidents than Dems have been.

In contrast to the 27% of GOPers approving of Obama now, more than a third of Dems (36%) approved of George W. Bush at a comparable time in 2001. Before that, only 26% of Republicans approved of Bill Clinton at the same time in his presidency, while 41% of Dems approved of both George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan at comparable times.

And as Chuck Todd explains:

And then the other thing that Republicans ought to be aware of when they're making these charges, is that the pool of Republicans has gotten smaller, and so sure, the most conservative part of the party is still identifying themselves as Republicans, and absolutely, three out of four disapprove of the President's job. But there are a lot of former Republicans sitting in that independent category now, Nora, and a majority of independents do approve of the President's job. So it is a, it's one of these things that Republicans ought to be careful about how they're writing it because it's not, it's not the best news. It's a smaller group of Republicans that are identifying themselves that way and when you're getting shellacked in the middle like that, it doesn't matter what the ends look like. The middle is what decides these elections and right now we're seeing the President, he had big numbers with the middle during the election and he still has big numbers with them now.