And there is this from Firedoglake:

Riverside Sheriff’s deputy Melissa Nieburger said that the sheriff’s department did have contacts with protest organizers, which included the California Courage Campaign, CREDO, MoveOn.org, 350.org, the California Nurses Association, United Domestic Workers of America and the main sponsor, the good-government group Common Cause, prior to the event, and that they were aware that some protesters would seek to be arrested for trespassing.

Why get arrested? Does that confer more media attention? Or is it some fuzzy thinking about civil disobedience? There are times when protest rallies make strategic sense. Participating can even be a morally righteous act. But I can't see how this is one of them. And I hope we aren't entering an era where angry progressives rabble rouse at private events for conservatives and Tea Party types respond in kind by protesting at George Soros sponsored events. Aside from bullhorn manufacturers I'm not sure who benefits, unless the idea is to intimidate the people who decide to attend such meetings, which is just dastardly. "Conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart, resplendent in shorts and roller skates, mulled around the crowd with a couple lackeys and a small video camera, talking to (and arguing with) attendees," the story notes. When he's filming your event, it's a pretty good bet that it isn't helping your image!

I'm not against street protests. The progressive anti-war marches were an appropriate type of dissent. Sure, there were excesses, as their critics reasonably point out. But the average protestors were innocent of them, their instinct that the War in Iraq would have disastrous consequences turned out to be right, and it's easy nowadays to forget that our troops are still occupying that faraway country. Guantanamo Bay, prison rape, undeclared drone attacks in numerous countries, imperial overreach at the Drug Enforcement Agency, surveillance policy: all kinds of progressive causes are suited to efforts at raising awareness. But assembling a large crowd to shout at people attending a private event because they're rich and give to political causes with which you disagree? Seems like bullying.

Yes, I am sympathetic to some of the organizations that the Kochs fund – places like Cato and Reason, mostly because they're great on all the civil liberties and foreign policy issues that I care about, including the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph. But look. There are big money donors to all sorts of ideological groups, and I'd never think of shouting my head off at any of them. To me, the villains in American politics aren't the folks donating to ideological causes with which they genuinely agree, even if you're someone who thinks the rules governing these sorts of donations should be changed. And besides, it seems like if you're protesting the role of money in politics, your target ought to be content neutral – that is to say, you should object to methods since they're used by everyone, rather than singling out for opprobrium the people whose particular message you find wrongheaded.

Torture is an endemic problem in Egypt and ending police abuse has been a driving element behind the massive popular demonstrations that swept Egypt over the past week - Human Rights Watch has documented the torture in a 95-page report, "'Work on Him Until He Confesses': Impunity for Torture in Egypt."

Egyptians deserve a clean break from the incredibly entrenched practice of torture. The Egyptian government's foul record on this issue is a huge part of what is still bringing crowds onto the streets today.

Prosecuting torture and ending the emergency laws that enable a culture of impunity for the security forces should be a priority for the new Egyptian government. 

The tanks of the military are being used as billboards for graffiti. The clean, yellowish vehicles are now spotted with slogans cursing the current president, asking him to leave the Egyptian people alone, or asking for the support of the army. The f-word was used prominently on one tank and followed by the name of Mubarak; the officers didn’t seem to mind. Everyday people have been standing next to the tanks, or even on the vehicles, and often posing for photos. Sometimes they even ask the officers to take photographs with them.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

But I’ve seen this kind of scenario unfolding before in Indonesia, South Korea, Mongolia, Thailand, Taiwan and China, and the truth is that sometimes troops open fire and sometimes they don’t. As far as I can see, Mubarak’s only chance to stay in power is a violent crackdown – otherwise, he has zero chance of remaining president. And he’s a stubborn old guy: he may well choose to crack heads; of course, whether the army would follow orders to do so is very uncertain. The army is one of the few highly regarded institutions in Egyptian society, and massacres would end that forever.

I’ll pick on Rand Paul and his slashing of the education budget. I’ve worked in business for a long time now in many different financially declining environments. So, I’ve seen many attempts to stabilize these declines through expense control. There’s a point when expense control deepens to the point of cost cutting. Once that happens, I have not been with a business that has not recovered without declaring bankruptcy or folding. You can’t cut your way to growth. And growth is the only thing that will get you out of a financial decline. The difference between expense control and cost cutting is that expense control looks to eliminate costs everywhere that they do not fund an operation that contributes to growth, but leaves intact all those areas that do foster growth. The trick, of course, and what makes a senior management team a good one, is being able to identify the difference. Rand Paul clearly cannot identify the difference.

Commission on Fine Arts? No contribution to growth. Education? 83% cut? Really?! Might as well cut off all our legs below our knees. If we do not IMPROVE education we will NOT achieve growth as a nation. The ‘internationalization’ of business has allowed businesses to tap into a worldwide pool of employees whose educations now surpass that of Americans, at far less cost. This is where the President’s message about the future rings true to me. If we want to maintain our standard of living here we have to justify the higher average salaries we hold vs most of the rest of the world. If we aren’t making things for less, then we have to be making better things. We have to be on the forefront of new industry to justify business paying more to have it done by Americans. And the only way to remain on the forefront of new industry is to invest in education.

Another:

I'm all for some tough love on the deficit, but no Consumer Product Safety Commission and instead rely on Consumer Reports?  I love Consumer Reports, but this is a totally bourgeois view of things.  By and large, the working poor and lower middle class do not read Consumer Reports, cannot afford Consumer Reports and may not even know what it is.  One of the silent ways that the U.S. standard of living has increased in the last 40 years is "safety creep" in everything from car seats to drills to ovens (not to mention NHTSA's car work, most stark of all).  Yeah, it has an air of paternalism, but this is paternalism that is universally publicly favored -  see, e.g., rush to hysteria on Chinese drywall or e-coli lettuce. Plus, this is essentially regressive vs. the poor and the young.  

Another reader:

Just like to point out that the suggestion that DOD take over the nuclear function from DOE is illegal. Nukes are to be administered by civilians, that's the law, Truman's Atomic Energy act of 1946.

What struck me most about the Rand Paul’s budget proposals were the extremely deep cuts to the National Science Foundation (62% !?).   This is in addition to significant cuts to the National Institute of Health,  the Centers for Disease Control,  abolition of the Department of Energy.  The Rand Paul budget would be a devastating blow to the sciences in the United States of America.

What is striking (and some of this may be due to omissions in the Washington Examiner article) are the choices of things that are not touched:  Agriculture subsidies (direct farm payments are about $20B annually versus $7B for the entire NSF budgets),  subsidies for oil,  gas or coal, etc.   These are things that Paul apparently feels are more important ways to spend money than basic sciences.

I am not sure what Paul was thinking when making these choices. My hypotheses (based on conversations from a few self-identified libertarians and Paul fans)

(1) Basic science will be funded by the private sector if it is not funded by the government.    

(2) Basic science when funded by the government is a form of largesse, corrupting the recipients, who invariably tow “the government line”. We will be better off without it.

(3) Basic science is not important.  At least not as important as continuing direct farm payouts.  Especially since Paul’s budget was a publicity stunt thrown together in a couple of days and will never be enacted.

Possibility  1 strikes me as a pipe dream-  there is no good economic model for basic sciences.  If there is a thriving scientific culture somewhere in the world where the private sector funds most basic research, please point me to it.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Paul thinks we can roll things back to how things worked in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Possibility 2, which I have actually heard expressed (usually in the context of global warming or health research),  is a form of elite bashing which might play well with some tiny segment of Paul’s base.  But honestly,  I’m not sure how many people really get excited about sticking it to the scientists.

As for possibility 3, I’ll let you make up your mind about that.

Another reader:

I will at least give Paul credit for being honest about what they think is important and what's not.  Some things seem pretty reasonable such as:

1. Selling Federal buildings
2. Reducing government travel (depending on what's really being cut there)
3. Defense cuts

However, I do see a number of flaws.  First of all, a lot of what he's doing is shuffling things around.  Does moving Department of Energy responsibilities under the Department of Defense make sense?  Does moving the Coast Guard under Department of Defense make sense given that the majority of the Coast Guard's purpose is law enforcement, search and rescue, etc?  Generally speaking departments are more accountable and effective when they aren't submerged in a larger bureaucracy (Homeland Security anybody?)

Furthermore, it seems that a lot of what he cuts would ultimately fall on states to handle.  That actually makes many of these functions more expensive in aggregate because each state would have to have it's own bureaucracy and raise taxes to cover that.  Examples include cutting education spending, and converting some national parks into state parks.  

Another:

Where to begin?  This plan is every bit as political as the one released by the Republican Study Group and could only have come from someone who has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to government programs.  I could point out that it is the antithesis of the technological vision that the President has laid out, but that would be beside the point, wouldn't it? I could also point out that neither ethanol or other farm subsidies appear to have been touched but, again, what would we expect from a Republican?

I'll just focus on the federal department I know most about, HUD, which is completely eliminated in Paul's plan.  Who takes these hits?

• Seniors -- whose low-income housing through Section 202 programs is eliminated. Find it distasteful to see a young homeless man sleeping on a park bench?  Wait till it's Grandma there!
• The Disabled -- whose Section 811 housing is eliminated.
• The poor -- who lose BOTH Section 8 vouchers and facility-based housing programs.
• Brownfields, Enterprise Zone and other economic development efforts that enable private developers to reclaim urban areas laid waste by previous business and manufacturing efforts. (These could be considered corporate welfare, except that most of the culprits have already left the scene.)

Now I realize that in Rand Paul's libertarian utopia the consequences don't matter. People should just take care of themselves, even poor, disabled seniors. Since shifting these burdens to the states is out of the question in this climate, people will just have to live (or die) with the consequences of their own decisions to grow old, become disabled or slide into poverty.

We don't have to imagine; we know what this looks like.  We have pictures from the Depression.

A final reader:

My initial reaction to Sen. Rand Paul's spending bill was shock. I saw immediately that he proposed to eliminate both the Section 8 Vouchers and the Affordable Housing Program. I work in the affordable housing industry, and the thought, that with the passage of a single bill, both the Section 8 program (which is a small part of my business) and the Affordable Housing Program (Including LIHTC, which is my entire business) left me upset and terrified. The idea that my somewhat comfortable lifestyle could be disrupted by unemployment so suddenly spurred a rather uncomfortable reaction.

Further reflection, however, has tempered my immediate reaction. A fiscal conservative by nature, I began to wonder if there wasn't something larger that I was missing in Sen. Paul's proposal. If we want to get spending under control, jobs are going to be lost. Some of these will be just and natural trimming, while others will be unfortunate casualties of our current situation. Regardless of what category I put myself in, or others put my position in, what is truly at stake? If the bill were to pass, would I complain about the horrifying prospect of finding another job, and take my anger out in the next election cycle? Or would my principals hold, and would I have the wisdom and the courage to recognize that my loss, though personally difficult, served a greater good?

I come from an often maligned generation (X, to be exact), that has not really had to sacrifice much in the way that our grandfathers and grandmothers did. Perhaps it is our time.

"The presence of the army in the streets is for your sake and to ensure your safety and wellbeing. The armed forces will not resort to use of force against our great people," the army statement said.

"Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands and are keen to assume their responsibility in protecting the nation and the citizens, affirms that freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody."

It urged people not resort to acts of sabotage that violate security and destroy public and private property. It warned that it would not allow outlaws and to loot, attack and "terrorise citizens".

That coup in South Vietnam didn't work out so well, and from the perspective of most Russians today, Mr Gorbachev's actions in Eastern Europe in 1989 were disastrous for Russian interests. Mohammed ElBaradei may proclaim that a post-Mubarak Egypt will be democratic and secular, but Mohammed ElBaradei is a retired United Nations official; there is no organised movement pledging fealty to him. He looks very much like a  Kerensky figure, the sort of well-known educated liberal internationalist who appears initially popular at the beginning of a revolution and is appealing to foreigners, but who is soon swept aside once the battle for power descends to the streets. 

(Photo: Egyptian demonstrators gather at dusk in Tahrir Square in Cairo on January 31, 2011, on the seventh day of protests against long term President Hosni Mubarak. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)

It’s an article of faith among conservatives that the fundamental cause of the crisis was excess lending to poor people and minorities. It’s equally an article of faith among liberals that the lending had little if anything to do with the crisis. The conservative view faces 2 powerful counter-arguments: (1) after the year 2000, the real driver of subprime lending was the non-bank sector, not subject to the CRA; and (2) the subprime market was just too small to tank the US financial sector. Sub-prime lending only became a threat when sub-prime loans were packaged into derivatives. The CRA did not require anyone to do that.

But the liberal view also faces a counter-argument: Sub-prime loans were the stuff of which the toxic derivatives were made, and it was not some idle whim or fancy of the bankers that led to the proliferation of sub-prime loans. For example, it was the pressure of the CRA that led to the invention of the concept of the “credit score” so as to diminish the discretion of lending institutions. Credit scores in turn became a driver of the expansion of credit to ever less creditworthy borrowers.

There is a sound critique of CRA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. But the notion that the financial crisis was mostly due to government forcing banks to offer loans to poor minorities is insulting and absurd. Without getting into a long complicated post, numerous companies made many billions of dollars off the US mortgage industry. We're supposed to believe they would've passed on that opportunity absent federal pressure? If politicos want to get government out of the housing business they should take a look at the mortgage interest deducation, the perverse incentives of which continue to this day.

And considering that Israel is one of the wealthiest countries in the world (with a per capita income at the same level as Great Britain) and is alleged to be going through an economic boom, there is little justification for continuing the largesse, which is largely driven by domestic politics in any event.  The argument that Israel needs the money to maintain its military edge is also a red herring as Tel Aviv currently enjoys complete military superiority in all areas over all of its potential opponents. It also has the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal.

For his audacity, Senator Paul has been attacked by the Israel Lobby and by both Democrats and Republicans. Now that the Obama Administration is considering withholding the $2 billion that Egypt receives annually, a sum granted in 1979 when Sadat abandoned the Palestinians and signed a peace treaty with Israel, it would perhaps be a good opportunity to reexamine all US aid to the region.  

It would be a good time to re-examine aid flowing to every region, which isn't to say that I want to eliminate all of it.

Something else I find interesting about it is that he will be the only 2012 candidate who has been elected to office and possesses foreign policy experience. His presence in the primary field will draw attention to the lack of experience that all of the others have, and it will make the attempts of Romney, Pawlenty and Thune, among others, to claim expertise in foreign policy seem even more ridiculous than they already do. It can’t help the eventual GOP nominee that Huntsman will have been pointing out his lack of qualifications on national security and foreign policy in debate after debate. Then again, Huntsman can’t be a particularly effective critic of Obama’s foreign policy as someone who was responsible for advancing the administration’s China policy, which neutralizes the one clear advantage he has over the others.

The Muslim Brotherhood might not end up in power; just as in Pakistan, the Islamists in Egypt represent only a minority of citizens. Which is not to say that the Brotherhood couldn't wind up in power, but it's too early to call the rise of the Brotherhood inevitable. If the Brothers do end up in power, then the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which is responsible for 30 years of stability in the eastern Mediterranean, would be in mortal danger, but even if Egypt were to break relations with Israel, this does not mean that war would necessarily follow. And what is more likely is that the Egyptian Army continues to play an important and stabilizing role, and the Egyptian Army, of course, depends on the United States for much of its budget, and it does not want to lose access to American-made weapons systems, which is what might happen if Egypt were to abrogate the peace treaty.

 

One focus will be on reviving a dormant proposal for data retention that would require companies to store Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for two years, CNET has learned. Tomorrow’s data retention hearing is juxtaposed against the recent trend to protect Internet users’ privacy by storing less data. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission called for “limited retention” of user data on privacy grounds, and in the last 24 hours, both Mozilla and Google have announced do-not-track technology.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who notes, "They call it the stupid party for a reason." With President Obama continuing his awful record on civil liberties – without much objection from elected Democratic officials – and the GOP reminding us why liberty-minded people loathed their prior stint running Congress, there's basically nowhere left for libertarians to turn. I don't begrudge anyone for thinking they're better off aligning with the Republicans or the Democrats. But I can't stand folks who pretend that advocates of overweening government are all on one side, or that the right thing to do at the ballot box is obvious.

Nine years into the American-led war, it’s no longer enough to say that corruption permeates the Afghan state. Corruption, by and large, is the Afghan state. On many days, it appears to exist for no other purpose than to enrich itself. Graft infests nearly every interaction between the Afghan state and its citizens, from the police officers who demand afghani notes to let cars pass through checkpoints to the members of Karzai’s government who were given land in the once empty quarter of Sherpur, now a neighborhood of grandiose splendor, where homes sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Bribes feed bribes: if an Afghan aspires to be a district police officer, he must often pay a significant amount, around fifty thousand dollars, to his boss, who is often the provincial police chief. He needs to earn back the money; hence the shakedown of ordinary Afghans. In this way, the Afghan government does not so much serve the people as it preys on them.

 

I first had to wait until the swelling went down, the sutures were removed, and my gums were healed. Then one of my several dentists cut into the scarred gum tissue, applied a bone graft, and put more sutures in the same tissue. As you might guess, my dental insurance (Delta Dental) will hardly cover anything - about 10% of an amount nearly the same as my hospital bill. I only get that much because my care will span two years, so I can claim the annual maximum coverage twice.

My story is about a single accident, not a disease of the teeth or gums that might have wider implications for health. It's about essentially the same small area of flesh and bone being cut into by two sets of doctors, one of whose costs can be insured against and another whose have to be borne directly. According to one of my several dentists, it's basically pointless to argue with a health insurer about a case like mine. Whether they paid for those first sutures in my broken face or not, if teeth are involved, the second set of sutures are not insured. He's heard of only one patient winning partial reimbursement from a health insurer, after years of trying.

I'm lucky: I had good insurance, a good job, a supportive family. But not having an option for catastrophic dental coverage wiped out my savings. If I were unlucky, it could have completely thrown my life off course.

[The accused Juan Carlos] Hernandez was just one of an increasing number of lay ministers and volunteers assuming formerly clerical roles in the Catholic Church, particularly in heavily Latino parishes, such as Denver’s. Facing a general shortage of priests, and a critical lack of ordained staff equipped to serve Spanish-speaking communities, a papal dictate was issued in 2003, calling for an expanded role for laity in the church’s ministry.

An interesting detail from later in the story:

An employee at a local bar called police after overhearing violent threats allegedly made by the man, Islamic Center of America Executive Administrator Kassem Allie said. The employee was afraid that Stockham was going to target Muslims or Arabs in the area, he said.

So often in these stories, a violent act is ostensibly averted thanks to the stupidity of the alleged perpetrator and someone he interacts with calling the police.

Reuters adds this detail:

He carried class-C fireworks -- called "consumer fireworks" by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, a police source said.

That's the type sold at stands around the Fourth of July, which is surprising. You'd have to have a hell of a lot of those fireworks to blow up a building. "It was a substantial quantity (of explosives), enough to do us harm," said Kassem Allie, 53, the executive administrator of the Islamic Center. It'll be interesting to see if the story is being hyped or if this guy ammassed a huge cache of consumer grade fireworks.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the hard left– aligned always with elements of the most radical Islamists against US interests– are joining the battle on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood. This repeats the pattern begun during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, as leftists like Michel Foucault serenaded Ayatollah Khomeini and the promise of a theocratic regime in that country. That a homosexual like Foucault would prefer the Shariah-adherent totalitarianism that was unleashed in Iran to the more pro-Western Shah is testament to the hard left’s fetishization of the post-colonial narrative: anything but America, and the more militantly anti-American, the more “legitimate.” Dinesh D’Souza argued, I believe convincingly, last year that Obama is similarly predisposed.

When Brietbart launched Big Peace, he wrote that "the site is pro-freedom, pro-liberty, and pro-American but will not be an outlet for false information or propaganda." So will he defend as plausible truth the notion that Obama desires the rise of a new Islamic caliphate in the Middle East? It would be nice if other conservatives who tout his Web properties would confront the disservice he does to his audience.

These are inseparable from the success of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's status as the right's most popular entertainer. Foremost is the echo chamber effect: a bubble where the Iraq War was always going swimmingly, patriotism seemed to require support for torture, and the Bush Administration's domestic agenda never lacked for defenders happy to obscure the manifold ways that it violated even the principles of conservatism. The conservative media isn't wholly responsible for 8 years of Republican rule that left the right exceptionally unhappy. But it acted as a consistent enabler of policies that did long term damage to the country and brought about an electoral flameout that handed progressives their biggest opportunity in years. 

Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and friends have also succeeded in dumbing down the right's ideas. How could it be otherwise when they traffic in absurd conspiracy theories that many prominent conservatives are afraid to directly contradict? If you only trust right-leaning media sources – that is true of many conservatives – who is pushing back against the notion that Barack Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist, or that all liberals are power-hungry statists bent on spreading tyranny as their preferred end? Perhaps there are instances when these sorts of lies produce a short term political advantage. In the long run, it is never worth the extra distance put between the right and an accurate grasp of reality.

Do you still want your own Fox News, your own Rush Limbaugh? If the left resembled the right in that way, what would become of your next generation of young thinkers? Someone high up at MSNBC once told me that Ezra Klein was blacklisted from the network for a time because he criticized Keith Olbermann. Would it be better if that sort of thing happend more often? If there were more talking heads liberals never criticized for fear of losing TV spots and book deals? Or is it preferable that an honest guy like Chris Hayes is getting get hosting gigs at MSNBC, while writers like Adam Serwer at a progressive magazine like The American Prospect is free to speak his mind when he disagrees with an ideological ally? Is there anyone a writer at Tapped coul criticize that would result in as much of a backlash as when Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin is criticized at The Corner? Do you wish there were?

If the left better resembled the right, surely Matthew Yglesias would've stayed at The Atlantic rather than going to the Center For American Progress in the alternative universe where the move included the intellectual strait-jacket The Heritage Foundation's bloggers wear. Would that have been good for liberals?

Or take Matthew Continetti, an exceptionally smart, talented young writer who has produced a book and many magazine articles that are to be admired. Due to the incentive system on the right, it made sense for him to write a book called "The Persecution of Sarah Palin." Is that a win for conservatives who want to advance smaller government or any other policy goal? Where I'm sitting, it seems like a waste for an ideological project when one of its best young writers labors over a book whose subject is a polarizing one-term governor's supposedly unique victimization. Do you think the left is capable of having the equivalent of Fox News and talk radio without ever ending up with its own Sarah Palin, and its own Matthew Continetti to squander precious time acting as her apologist?

The left has its own malign influences on public discourse. Some are rich and successful. It no more makes sense for liberals to envy the right it's talk radio hosts than it makes sense for the right to envy the left for Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, or Michael Moore, which isn't to say these people are perfect analogues – they're certainly they're less influential among liberals than Limbaugh is among conservatives, and it would be wrong to draw a false equivalence. But these figures were successful in gathering followers and driving stories. In the realm of politics, the pathologies that came as part of the package still resulted in a net loss.

The antidote for Fox News isn't Keith Olbermann. It's Jon Stewart. It isn't a new left-leaning host who turns Glenn Beck-style destructive absurdity to different ideological ends – it's someone who effectively demosntrates the absudity of blowhards.

Cross-ideological envy does make sense sometimes. But I insist that everything would turn out a lot better for our country if we tried to emulate the best of what the other side has to offer – if the right envied The New York Times for its unparalleled news gathering operation and cultural influence, and tried to emulate it. Or if the left envied the right for the tranformative impact City Journal had on New York City's governance, or the Tea Party's impressive ability to get its members out to rallies to demonstrate its numbers, or the steadfastness of those evangelicals who refuse to compromise their deeply held principles even when pragmatically their battles are lost. Even if you object to these specific examples, one needn't agree with the other side to see its many admiral qualities.

But it's a lot easier to copy the other side's least attractive qualities, and imagine that when you've benefitted from the attendant power, everything will turn out better. That isn't how things work. And deep down most people know it.