… is Pat Quinn. (Good Irish name, that.) The NYT reports today that

In 1980, one of Mr. Quinn’s petition drives ended the practice that allowed Illinois legislators to collect their entire salaries on the first day in office. Along with his other petitions, like the one that reduced the size of the legislature, he was not earning a lot of friends in state government.

One afternoon in 1976, he visited the Capitol and took a seat in the gallery.

“They said, ‘Up there in the gallery is that Pat Quinn,’ ” he remembered one lawmaker saying. “And they stood up and booed for three minutes. One guy called it a standing boo-vation.”

A few years later, he was elected commissioner of the Cook County Board of Tax Appeals, his first elected office. He has served in a number of other positions, usually gravitating to veterans affairs, environmental and consumer protection issues. He was elected state treasurer in the early 1990s.

Mr. Quinn said he was not sure whether he would run in 2010, when Mr. Blagojevich’s term ends. As it was, he had not decided what to do when his term as lieutenant governor was up.

One thing he will not do, he said, is let his newfound popularity go to his head.

“You want to know my philosophy?” Mr. Quinn said. “One day a peacock. The next day a feather duster.”

I like the sound of this guy.

Paul Krugman on some of the Republican arguments against Obama’s stimulus package.

But the obvious cheap shots don’t pose as much danger to the Obama administration’s efforts to get a plan through as arguments and assertions that are equally fraudulent but can seem superficially plausible to those who don’t know their way around economic concepts and numbers. So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000 — and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

Mark Anderson is asking who should be held to account for all the Iraqi civilians killed since the US invasion.

Using these techniques, IBC reports between 90,400 to 98,700 civilian deaths to date. This conservative floor remains much higher than Bush administration claims of somewhere in the 15K+ region.

When this argument has continued for awhile, it is likely that no single study will prevail, but that the method of counting by randomized, direct survey will be the most accurate method. It is hard to make the argument, outside of scientific circles, that ethics or war crimes tribunals will distinguish between whether there were 100K deaths officially recognized by media and government, or 600K civilians actually killed, or twice that figure.

Who is responsible for these deaths? Why did these people die? For what? Non existent WMDs? Non existent Iraqi Al Qaeda?

Let’s say George Bush’s idea of Pre-emptive War has just killed something like 500k-1MM innocent civilians in Iraq, and that the war itself was a mistake. Or, much more worrisome, along Clarke’s lines, it was not a mistake at all. According to one of Rumsfeld’s top aides, who took notes at a meeting on 9.11, Rumsfeld wanted to go after Saddam “whether or not he was relevant” to the 9.11 attack.

Now what happens? Golf in Dallas? Cheney speechifying in Jackson Hole? Rummy rewriting history?

Now what happens?

And what about our own Revd. Blair’s responsibilities in this matter?

From Henry Porter in yesterday’s Observer.

Look no further than the news of recent days to know why the Convention on Modern Liberty, launched last week in London by Baroness Kennedy, is so critical and is inspiring such support. As co-director, I would naturally talk it up, but many have been struck by the contrast – actually, I would say lunatic hypocrisy – in a government where you have a foreign secretary who, swooning for Obama, called for Britain to champion the rule of law and “uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties at home” and a justice secretary who a few hours before had announced measures in the Coroners and Justice Bill (a tricksy little portmanteau if ever there was one) that will bring in secret inquests and legalise a vast exchange of personal data between government departments.

Convention is on February 28, at venues around the country. See the web site for details. You can also follow it on Twitter.