Ben Adler and Jason Zengerle bothnote Joe Biden's odd theory as to why he can do well in the South as a presidential candidate:
You don't know my state. My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state.
Atrios also chimes in. In Biden's semi-defense, the article is a little unclear, but I think that was in answer to a question about whether or not Biden thought he could win primary elections in the South against the region's native sons. Biden is arguing that the electorate in Democratic primaries in Dixie is heavily African-American and that, in light of Delaware's large black population, he has experience with appealing to that demographic.
Three further points. One is that if Biden genuinely thinks he's going to be president some day, he's seriously deluded, but that sort of delusion is widespread in the Senate. Second is that Atrios and Zengerle are agreeing about something! Third is that I just looked it up and, interestingly, Delaware really was part of the Southern political bloc throughout the 19th century. By the end of World War I, however, that had ceased to be the case and the state regularly went GOP notwithstanding the existence of the "solid South." Maryland has made a similar transition from being politically Southern to politically non-Southern, and a similar process is maybe taking place in Virginia as we speak.
I totally would if only we could stop referring to the neighborhood as "MidCity." I'd really like a Trader Joe's, but the speed with which the local business association and members shady real estate cabals have been able to foist this term on the world is distressing.
This is pretty sweet. Genuine rightwinger Steve Laffey is mounting a primary challenge to moderate Republican Lincoln Chaffee. If Chaffee loses the primary, Laffey will almost certainly lose the general. So the RSCC has decided to deploy some anti-immigration hysteria against Laffey
New column from me at The American Prospect Online, "Fear of a Ninth Planet" makes the case against denying Pluto it's rightful status as a planet. I should perhaps note that despite enjoying the "reality-based community" phrase, I actual adhere to a fairly Kuhnian line about the nature and history of science which some folks would regard as unduly relativistic.
Finally, the NYT reefers a big piece on arid conditions in the Great Plains, which have left "farmers and ranchers with conditions that they compare to those of the Dust Bowl of the 1930's." It's the worst drought since … well, maybe 2003, "an extremely dry summer that … brought back memories of the 1930's Dust Bowl" (NYT, Sept. 5, 2003). Or maybe 2002, when "farmers shrug[ed] and wonder[ed] if a new Dust Bowl [would] soon be upon them" (NYT, May 3, 2002). Or 1998: "a dry spell that officials say shows signs of developing into the costliest and most devastating the region has seen since the Dust Bowl years" (NYT, Aug. 12, 1998). Or 1996: "Coming after two years of low rainfall and a number of other weather problems, the ferocity of this year's drought has slowly begun to evoke memories for some here of the Depression-era Dust Bowl" (NYT, May 20, 1996). Or 1988: "Since the spring's dry weather evolved into the worst drought since the Dust Bowl, the farm policy has been turned upside down" (NYT, July 10, 1988). Or 1982: "And when the winds come, turning the sky dark with dust and burying fence rows under shifting dunes of soil and thistle, those who are old enough remember the bleak days of the Dust Bowl." (NYT, May 14, 1982). Or 1980: "Is the nation in for a new Dust Bowl or at least a succession of scorching summers?" (NYT, July 17, 1980).
The thing of it is that before some clever rebranding, the area we currently know as the "Great Plains" was called "The Great American Desert." It's not genuinely a desert, but it really is quite dry. And, of course, an area that's dry-ish most of the time is going to be subject to frequent droughts. Many Native American practiced agriculture, but the ones who lived on the plains/deserts generally didn't and this was not a coincidence. The local climate has its ups and downs, but it's a fundamentally marginal area that already stays viable mostly because of federal protections for domestic agriculture products. It seems a bit perverse to just encourage the empty-ish part of the country to get emptier at a time when housing is becoming increasingly expensive, but it got empty-ish out there for a reason. Before it was flyover country, that's the part of the country you would try and pass through in a covered wagon before reaching the more promising terrain in Oregon.
What with moving and all, I haven't really had the chance to follow the World Championships as much as I'd like. My sense, however, has been that Carmelo Anthony has morphed from being one of Team USA's least-effective contributors, statistically speaking, in the NBA to being Team USA's best player in the Worlds. Dave Berri crunched the numbers and that's the conclusion he reached, too.
It's the last week in town for my friends Genevieve and Emily capping off the traditional late-summer exodus and consequent need to try and make some new friends somewhere. This got me thinking; I always tend to assume that DC is unusually transient in this particular way -- lots of people leaving town every summer and lots of new people coming in every fall -- but do I have any reason to think that's the case? In retrospect, I do not. Certainly, there's a lot of transience. But DC also just happens to be the only place I've lived during my time in the peak-transience age bracket. For all I know, LA or New York has even more churn.
Huh. Apparently there's a Baltimore City Paper. Who knew? Said paper contains an article about The Wire, thus indicating that it's a superior publication to the tawdry Washington City Paper. I've been avoiding the temptation to watch the review copy of the entire season that the producers sent to the Prospect offices since I'd like to take it all in at the proper pace, but the City Paper guy watched 'em all and says "it's the most gripping, ambitious season the show has produced to date."
The very kind Tyler Cowen writes that this new site "will continue to offer my favorite TV and NBA reviews on the web, along with his regular incisive-but-I-wish-he-were-more-cynical-about-government-and-more-sanguine-about-the-transformational-power-of-economic-growth Democratic political analysis." Cowen's a libertarian, so I expect we won't see eye-to-eye on this, but I actually think I am pretty cynical about government. I've learned a lot from my various libertarian friends, from my seminar with Robert Nozick, from libertarian blogs, etc. and I think public choice economics is a very important perspective. The upshot of this is that, as a general matter, I'm considerably less enthusiastic about regulatory solutions to policy problems than are most liberals.
Sadly, though, the upshot of my libertarian-infused cynicism has mostly been to push me left of where I used to be on domestic policy issues. It's cynicism about government and the political process that, for example, has made me much more enthusiastic about labor unions and much more hostile to means-testing entitlements than I used to be. If I believed that the deliberative democracy people weren't naive fools, I'd be much more sanguine about various "third way" approaches to things.
I'd been getting depressed about the Wizards' prospects for next season. The center of the team is Agent Zero, Professor of Gilbertology who, by all accounts, requires a steady diet of perceived slights in order to motivate himself. Recently, though, the slights hadn't been coming. After being snubbed for the All-Star Game, he wound up as David Stern's replacement for the injured Jermaine O'Neal. Then came the playoffs where I kept hearing national television commentators describing him as "underrated" and explaining to the fans that he, like LeBron James, is one of the best young players in the league. Then he's named to the Third Team All-NBA and selected for the Team USA roster where he wound up not making the final cut allegedly due to injury. All-in-all, Arenas was at risk of getting too fat, happy, and satisfied. But now he's bringing the bitterness:
"No joke, I felt like I was the 16th man on a 15-man roster," Arenas said. "You are there to support your team and support your country and be happy to play but you know, I did everything they wanted me to do; but if I did everything they wanted me to do, why am I on the bubble of getting cut? I sacrificed. You've got LeBron being LeBron. You've got Carmelo being Carmelo. You've got D-Wade being D-Wade. Why can't I be me? Why do I have to transform? I did that and now you are going to cut me?"
Right on! Fuck those guys. Let Gilbert be Gilbert! Yes, of course, it's true that there was nothing actually unfair about this, but as long as Gilbert feels it was unfair we're on solid ground. His apparent good attitude about being asked to transform himself into either a traditional point guard or a spot-up shooter (again, the right things to ask of him as a member of Team USA) was indicative of a distressing lack of egomania. Now we're in good shape. Indeed, if I believed for a minute that Darius Songaila was going to add "toughness" to the team (that's what the front office wants us to believe), I'd be downright optimistic.
Sommer Mathis lays the smack down on me for casting aspersions on the authenticity of the "MidCity" locution. Apparently, the name has a fairly lengthy lineage and referred to the broadish swathe of neighborhoods served by the Green Line which, during planning phases, was often called the "Mid-City Line."
... so, Matt, what's your book about? It's a good question. The answer, in short, is that the theory and practice of progressive national security politics and policy. In particular, it advances the argument that the political problem for contemporary progressives has been a failure to convince the American public that the Democratic Party offers a coherent and viable approach to national security policy. It denies that the issue here is that liberals need to "get tough" or some such thing. Rather, the problem has been a failure to advance a principled and coherent alternative to Bush-style hegemonism.
Team USA eliminated from World Championship. We didn't even manage to lose to Spain or Argentina, falling instead to . . . Greece. Seemingly the main problem was poor three point shooting.
It oftentimes seems to me that there's a vast conspiracy between free market dogmatists and left-wing anti-capitalists to massively overstate the power of large business corporations vis-a-vis nation-states. That's not to deny that large corporations have a lot of power, but merely to observe that non-dysfunctional states have a ton of power. I mean, is it really credible to argue that the CEO of Sara Lee is more powerful than the head of the Congress Party in India? India has nuclear weapons and over 1 billion residents. Sara Lee has . . . tasty dessert products.
This is pretty sweet. Cliff May just states more-or-less explicitly that the whole utility of "Islamic fascism" as a turn of phrase is that it makes it easier to conflate disparate groups into a single menace. Intriguingly, I think May's Corner colleague Mario Loyola actually makes a good point about all this. In the past, we saw no need to make up names to call our enemies. "Fascist," "Nazi," and "Communist" are all just the terms that Fascists, Nazis, and Communists used to describe their movements. They're perjorative terms today just because people generally don't like Fascists and Nazis and Communists. But to call a Communist a "Communist" is no insult to him and never was. Nevertheless, we seemed to get along just fine.
The man who brought us "blogofascism" won't be missed now that he's gone. The Google cache of the specific comment thread that seems to have been his downfall is here. The fascinating thing is that Siegel's sockpupptet Sprezzatura was busy accusing a different commenter, Jhschwartz, of secretly being "Mark Greif . . . or someone in his circle." Grief is the editor of N + 1, which is probably the best magazine on the planet.
New Pentagon report puts it a bit more politely than that but you don't really need to read very far between the lines. I still find it fairly astounding that the defense department can't seem to admit to itself that the very "Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq," namely "Sustained ethno-sectarian violence" just are a civil war. At the moment, it's lower intensity than some civil wars have been, and lower intensity than the Iraqi civil war probably will become at some point.
Prospect subscribers can see my most recent take on Iraq. A rough summary would be this. As of just a few months ago, I think it's possible that a smarter policy centered around some kind of framework for withdrawal combined with a push toward political compromise could have actually worked. Worked in the sense of having a decent chance of avoiding a giant bloodbath. But that moment has passed and one way or another, Iraq is almost certainly screwed. The only question is how long our troops will need to keep suffering because our political elites can't admit that.
Is there seriously somebody out there in blogland who thinks it's "a great testament to economic progess that, walking round the city center these days, say, it's very hard to differentiate the rich and the poor in the first instance" and that "in this sense, things have indeed become a lot more egalitarian?"
In my gentrifying 'hood, I feel like it's extremely easy to sit on your porch and tell the gentrifiers apart from the working class. Arguably, I suppose, that's because class divisions in DC tend to correlate highly with racial ones, but even so it at least seems to me as if members of the black middle class are readily identifiable as such. Of course the trouble with any contentions one might make about this is that they're hard to falsify since I'm not running around asking people whether or not they went to college or how much money they make.
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