« September 24, 2006 - September 30, 2006 | Main | October 8, 2006 - October 14, 2006 » October 1, 2006 - October 7, 2006 ArchivesOctober 1, 2006DC SchoolsThomas Toch and Sara Mead explain in some detail what Districtites are always wondering -- why are the schools here so bad? It turns out to be a bit complicated. On the other hand, the potential improvement glossed near the end of the article seem rather small-scale relative to the scope of the difficulties at hand. Democracy AllianceAri Berman has a fantastic article in the new issue of The Nation on the subject of the Democracy Alliance -- the newish coalition of rich liberals that's been counted on to fund the creation of a new progressive infrastructure to save America, etc. To make a long story short, there are some problems here . . . hopefully problems that will be resolved (it's not super-unusual for something to get off to a rocky start), but one fears they may not be. PlaybookBill Simmons has some doubts about Al Saunders' legendary playbook: [A]llow me to be the 10,000th person to chime in on Al Saunders' 700-page playbook. I'd like to think that I'm a relatively smart person -- did well on my SATs once upon a time, haven't had a job where I had to shower before 10:30 a.m. in my entire life, feel like I'm reasonably well-read, and so on. With that said, the thought of memorizing a 700-page playbook gives me the shakes. I don't feel like I could do it. So how does someone like Clinton Portis or Chris Cooley pull it off? Wouldn't there be screw-ups all the time? We're forced to read 25 stories a day about Terrell Owens, but I'd love to read one explaining why it's a smart idea to have a 700-page playbook. Just one. I've been assuming this "700 pages" business is some kind of bullshit for much that reason; either there is not 700 page playbook or else there's some kind of counting trick happening here. Showing up I wasn't expecting this reaction at all, but having read the article I think Matt Bai really nails it, writing about Howard Dean, his "50 State Strategy," his conflicts with the DSCC and DCCC, and related matters: Most analysts in both parties now believe that Democrats have better-than-even odds of winning at least the House. But if they don’t, rather than dissect the mechanical failures that cost them a few thousand votes here or there, Democrats might be forced to admit, at long last, that there is a structural flaw in their theory of party-building. Even a near miss, at a time of such overwhelming opportunity, would suggest that a national party may not, in fact, be able to win over the long term by fixating on a select group of industrial states while condemning entire regions of the country to what amounts to one-party rule. Which would mean that Howard Dean is right to replant his party’s flag in the towns and counties along America’s less-traveled highways, even if his plan isn’t perfect, and even if he isn’t the best messenger to carry it out. As another flawed visionary, the filmmaker Woody Allen, once put it, 80 percent of success is just showing up. Another thing I would add, that Bai doesn't really get into, is that just about every election looks uniquely crucial. Which isn't to deny that 2006 does, in fact, look uniquely crucial. But I recall 2004 and 2002 as having looked the same way. This is just a natural human bias toward over-emphasizing the present, but there it is none the less. Everyone agrees that the long term needs to be addressed sometime or other and, really, there's no time like the present. October 2, 2006The CoverupI haven't gotten a chance to post on Rep. Foley's apparent taste for harrassing teenage congressional pages since the very first inklings of this story began to trickle out. When considering the House leadership's preposterous effort to exonerate themselves in this mess, it's worth considering the sheer speed with which the story has developed. Integral to the leadership's case is Dennis Hastert's effort to draw a distinction between Foley's emails, and Foley's IM messages. And, of course, Hastert's right -- the former were suggestive, but not damning in the way the IMs were. That said, the emails were genuinely suggestive -- weird, inappropriate communications that suggested something bigger was going on. Various media organizations saw the emails and when they did, they decided to dig deeper, leading to the IMs. And it didn't take very long once people were on the case. The difference, in other words, isn't that the press saw something (the IMs) that the GOP leadership didn't see. The difference is that when ABC News and others saw smoke, they went looking for fire. They investigated. When Hastert and co. saw smoke, by contrast, they decided to turn off the smoke detectors and hope the house didn't burn down until after the midterms. Which is bad enough on its own terms, but when you think about it is also more-or-less how today's Republican Party handles information of all kinds, up to and including things directly related to the conduct of shooting wars. Strategic Restraint The interesting plot development in the fourth episode of The Wire is that we're finally getting some real peeks at Marlo Stanfield's character and personality and so far, compared to the other criminals who've had a major role on the show, he seems like a . . . gigantic asshole. One theme we've seen consistently through the show is that, in the game, just as in counterinsurgency or grand strategy, it's often useful to apply strategic restraint rather than deploy maximum violence. Stringer Bell was the street figure most associated with this philosophy, but it clearly lives on in Prop Joe's co-op. And, indeed, even though the Bell-Avon split at times appeared to be on this very point, the script flipped late in Season 3 when Stringer suddenly wanted to hit Clay Davis and Avon pointed out that you can't be killing state senators. Marlo, too, seemed to be down with the program. When Lex kills Fruit, Marlo's crew wants to retaliate massively against all of Lex's associates. Marlo discerns that Lex's beef with Fruit was personal, and that though he needs to kill Lex to demonstrate that you don't fuck with Marlo's crew, he also wants to minimize the violence so he retaliates only against Lex. Marlo's handling of the security guard, however, is very much at odds with this approach. An extra corpse has been generated for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the interests of the business. What's more, the victim in this case is a civilian, a taxpayer, which is a much more serious step than killing a gangbanger -- we've seen consistently that the Baltimore PD investigates such matters more rigorously than crook-on-crook violence. All of which raises the question of how this links up to the education theme: Marlo has been mostly portrayed as a source of education, along with Bubbles, Prez, Cutty, Omar, etc. But the other dealers in the co-op always emphasize Marlo's youth. Is he a teacher, or one of those who's going to get schooled? The Unbearable Averageness of Gilbertology?Wages of Wins has gotten around to its Washington Wizards summary and reaches an unorthodox conclusion. The 'Zards, in Dave Berry's view, had a strong supporting cast ("Only Boston, Dallas, Indiana, Miami, and San Antonio managed to have this many above average performers") but Agent Zero himself isn't especially good ("Of last year’s playoff teams, only the Sacramento Kings and Milwaukee Bucks were led in Wins Produced by a less productive player"). This sort of seems like one of these conclusions one could reach if and only if one had never actually . . . watched the team play or seen the Wizards offense go to shit without the professor of Gilbertology on the floor. Iraq as HumanitarianismEric Posner throws down in The Washington Post demolishing the "humanitarian" case for the Iraq War: Saddam Hussein was an especially bad tyrant, and Iraqi civilian casualties attributable to the U.S. intervention do not yet equal what he was able to accomplish, albeit over a longer period. The Kurds and many Shiites are better off. And many Iraqis continue to think that the war was worth it, according to polls. Posner goes on to make a broader argument I don't really agree with (though I do agree with part of it) so this gets to be a rare case where I say read the excerpt, not the whole thing!. More PosnerFurther thoughts on Eric Posner's broader argument against humanitarian intervention, which I said I mostly disagreed with earlier. Basically, I do agree that Iraq should make people (like me) who were humanitarian intervention enthusiasts in, say, 1999 somewhat more cautious. But there is a baby/bathwater issue here and I think it's hard to say anything super-general about the matter. Circumstances vary, and there's a lot of "it depends" factors here. But what does it depend on? Some scattered bullet-points below: Damned If...Obviously, I agree with Sebastian Mallaby that I wish Democrats had been a bit more vigorous in their opposition to the torture bill. That said, let's get real. Does anyone seriously believe that if the Democrats had done that Mallaby would have written a column saying "Democrats are great, the GOP sucks, go out and put Pelosi in the Speaker's office?" Mark me down as a "no," on that one. Instead, we would have had a column about how Democrats are right about torture, but somehow "soft" on terrorism nonetheless. Or else he would have made something else up to complain about.\ A certain number of our elite pundits -- Mallaby high among them -- are just constitutionally incapable of being nice to the Democratic Party or to American liberals. As the right's rule proves itself to be worse and worse, they'll become increasingly critical of Bush. But that merely forces them to devise ever-more complaints about the opposition. And one of the Democrats' very worst instincts is a tendecy to care about what these kind of people think. The Stakes"The fierceness of the tactical dispute over the best methods by which an activist federal government should solve all social ills may," writes my man Julian Sanchez of the mutual loathing between contemporary liberals and today's big government GOP, "more than anything else, reflect the narcissism of small differences." As a former philosophy major just like Julian, let me suggest that what it actually reflects is something a philosophy major is likely to ignore -- the relative unimportance of very abstract ideas to politics. Actual American politics -- as opposed to political theory -- is structured around the competition of various organized interests to capture the power of the federal government and use it to advance their ends. These groups, in turn, are to some extent meta-organized into two somewhat enduring competing teams aligned with the two major political parties. That these teams sort of agree that, in the abstract, "seize control of the levers of government and use them to advance our interests" is a sound political program is really neither here nor there in terms of making the differences between the teams "small." Both the gay rights movement and the gay-repression movement agree, for example, that the coercive authority of the state ought to be deployed on behalf of a given conception of homosexuality. Gay rights groups want, for example, not only to end the state's discrimination against gays and lesbians, but also want the state to force private actors to stop discriminating against gays and lesbians (via, for example, employment- and housing-discrimination laws) in their capacity as private citizens. It would be silly, however, to describe the disagreement about whether the state should be used to actively discriminate against gays and lesbians or should be used to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians as a "small differene" or some kind of trivial quarrel. Obviously, these are directly opposed agendas, and supporters of each agenda have eminently good reasons to fear and loath the advocates of the other agenda. Simply put, the practical stakes are rather high for most people even if the disagreements exist at a relatively low level of abstraction. October 3, 2006Enter The Taliban
That said, I do think it's worth pointing out that several weeks ago I was at one of these panel events. This very subject came up, and a range of expert-type dudes with generally sound views all thought that this was the thing to do. Their take was that there had long been a Taliban faction that was uncomfotable with the group's association with Osama bin Laden, and that tried to persuade their colleagues to sell him out after 9/11. They failed, the whole crew got booted from government, and now you get the current situation. But since the hard-core has disproportionately gotten themselves killed, the theory goes, the "moderate Taliban" (not actually especially moderate in their views about domestic governance) now has a stronger hand and it should be possible to cut a deal with them and bring them into the fold. Blogging involves a lot of discussing issues you don't really understand, and I really wouldn't want to claim any expertise in the nuances of Afghan politics, but it seems worth making the point that sensible people are thinking along these lines. It seems to me that, politically speaking, to make any such arrangement work it would be absolutely vital for whomever you cut a deal with to stop calling themselves "Taliban" since it's never going to fly with Americans under that name. A Long Time AgoTonight is the season premiere of Veronica Mars on the merger-born new CW network. It's not the best show on television, but it's pretty darn close. It's also, by most accounts, at imminent risk of being canceled. The network only ordered half a season, so if ratings for these early episodes don't show improvement, it'll almost certainly get the ax. The good news is that it's considerably more accessible that, say, The Wire and I'm fairly certain a person could just watch and enjoy tonight's episode without fully understanding the backstory. I myself just started watching it in the middle of season two before backtracking on DVD to the beginning of season one. Nominally, the show's about Veronica Mars, teen detective, and her father, a former sherrif now working as a private eye. More deeply, though, it's about the class struggle in America -- one of the few elements of our popular culture that really deals with class per se. WarningsGlad we've gotten that cleared up. Condoleezza Rice was, in fact, warned of al-Qaeda threats on July 10, 2001 by George Tenet and Tenet's counterterrorism guy, Cofer Black. Rice's story is now that she denied any such meeting had taken place because she forgot. Well, let's just say I don't find that especially plausible. She got the briefing, blew it off as just another dude whining that his issue is the most important one and deserves more attention, then -- bam -- two months later thousands of people are dead. Never took the opportunity to look back and reflect? Never had a sleepless night wondering "could I have done more?" Never thought back to that briefing that seemed so trivial at the time? But maybe she forgot. Maybe this is just a government composed of extraodinarily thoughtless people who never took a minute to look back at their pre-9/11 behavior and see if anything might have gone wrong. Maybe she's not lying and she's just incredibly irresponsible. It's often hard to say with this crew. And lord knows they were helped by a press corps that showed no interest for years in the question of whether or not the occurrence of a massive terrorist attack on Bush's watch might reflect poorly on the people in office at the time, rather than simply providing a venue to demonstrate Churchillian grandeur. Rising Suns?In his insider-only team forecasts, John Hollinger makes a couple of interesting points about the Phoenix Suns beyond the obvious giant question marks surrounding the Amare Stoudemire issue. One, he points out that they slightly underperformed in terms of "expected win-loss" (a formula based on point-differential, designed to factor out luck and contingency), winning 54 games when they "should" have won 55. Dallas, meanwhile, actually won 60 but only had 58 expexted wins so the margin is smaller than it looked. The other is that the injury to Kurt Thomas had a bigger impact than most people talk about, with him "Phoenix had given up 100.2 points per game on 44 percent shooting. Following the injury, Phoenix allowed 107.6 points on 47.8 percent shooting." Viewed this way, the Suns could be serious contenders if either Thomas stays healthy or Amare can make valuable contributions and it's not necessarily the case that everything hinges on Stoudemire. If both of those guys and play, I wonder who starts for Phoenix. Since there's a bunch of multi-position guys on this squad, you could play a big Thomas-Stoudemire-Marion-Diaw-Nash lineup, but that strikes me as an un-Suns way to play. In a lot of ways, keeping Thomas on the bench and starting Raja Bell at shooting guard seems to make more sense, but not if Thomas is really so crucial to the Phoenix defense. So maybe you use Diaw as an all-purpose sixth man. Non-Proliferation for DummiesThings get worse and worse, as North Korea promises a nuclear test. It's always -- always -- worth revisiting Fred Kaplan's "Rolling Blunder" on how Bush made a hash of our DPRK policy. "Pedophilia" Not to get too thick in the weeds of apologetics here, but it's certainly true that use of the term "pedophilia" in the context of the Mark Foley scandal should be resisted. What Foley was up to was sleazy and wrong (and, it seems, possibly illegal) but being attracted to older teens isn't pedophilia. I think the gay angle clouds people's thinking about this. You'll see on the right a photo of Scarlett Johannssonn in Ghost World. She was born on November 22, 1984 and the film was released in 2001, so it would have been shot was she was sixteen years old. I think it's rather self-evident that to classify anyone who thinks this is a picture of an attractive woman as a pedophile would be to drain the term of any real meaning. One could fairly subject a much older man actively persuing a sexual relationship with a sixteen year-old to all sorts of criticism, but pedophilia isn't a plausible candidate. UPDATE: Just to be clear, it's possible for something both to be wrong and to not be pedophilia. Lots of things that aren't pedophilia are wrong. I'm trying to defend the English language here, not Foley's conduct. BleggingOkay, I tried this once before and it worked, so why not try again? If anyone out there in blog-land has a ticket to the October 30 Decemberists show at the 9:30 Club that they'd be interested in selling me, said individual would be my hero for all time. Just saying. Also -- got the new album yesterday . . . very good stuff. What Would al-Qaeda Do?Via Blake Hounshell, al-Qaeda leaders say they want the occupation of Iraq to continue as long as possible: The most important thing is that you continue in your jihad in Iraq, and that you be patient and forbearing, even in weakness, and even with fewer operations; even if each day had half of the number of current daily operations, that is not a problem, or even less than that. So, do not be hasty. The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness and firm rooting, and that it grows in terms of supporters, strength, clarity of justification, and visible proof each day. Indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest, with God’s permission. An important point that, naturally enough, I have no doubt the press will overwhelmingly ignore. October 4, 2006Tapes 'N Tapes Kevin Drum reminds us that not only does al-Qaeda want us to stay in Iraq, they also want the Republicans to stay in office and time the release of their bin Laden videos to advance GOP electoral fortunes. It's important to keep that in mind. John Kerry didn't suffer from "bad luck" in terms of having his campaign partially derailed by a late-October bin Laden tape, that happened intentionally and had the intended effect. It's only reasonable to assume there's a large probability something similar will happen over the next month or so and folks need to get the message out in advance that this is al-Qaeda's game. Despotism WatchI'd sort of forgotten about this story: According to the lawsuit filed at U.S. District Court in Denver, Howards and his son walked to about two-to-three feet from where Cheney was standing, and said to the vice president, "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible," or words to that effect, then walked on. Now the good news is that the Eagle County District Attorney's office dropped all charges, notwithstanding the Secret Service's request that Howards be issued a summons for harrassment. But as Andrew Sullivan points out, you have to look at this sort of thing in the context of our novel torture and detention policies. They could have had Howard detained indefinitely without trial. While in detention, Howard could have been subjected to "coercive interrogation" designed at producing a confession. At a quasi-judicial proceeding, the coerced interrogation could have been used as evidence against him and kept secret from his legal team. You get the picture. Now do I think it's likely that the next person who gets in Cheney's face will be detained, tortured, and convicted on serious terrorism charges? No, I don't. But you don't need to use these powers in an abusive way on a regular basis simply in order to scare people into the belief that getting in the VP's face isn't worth the risk. And the same powers that can be used to intimidate a random citizen can be used against protest-organizers, hostile journalists, etc. Losing K-LoWhen you've even lost K-Lo with your hackery, you're, well, a gigantic hack. The right's hack propagandists bear an enormous amount of the blame for the sorry situation the country finds itself in. People often wonder to me what the deal is with the tens of millions of remaining Bush loyalists -- are they just morons, or what? But they're not morons. They're ordinary people and like ordinary people they have a lot of demands on their time and, consequently, don't make an intensive study of all the leading issues of the day. And, naturally, they do a lot of deferring to the expressed views of people they trust. Not being liberals, "people they trust" doesn't mean liberal pundits -- it means conservative ones. Millions of people out there are counting on conservative television and radio personalities to let them know if something goes dramatically wrong with the governance of the country. Instead, for years you saw what amounted to overwhelming lockstep support. It's worth keeping in mind that whatever you may think of the NRO gang, they're about three hundred times as intellectually honest as the average conservative broadcast media outlet. OnwardSpencer Ackerman notes that we now have confirmation that the invasion of Iraq was intended as the overture in a broader regional war, including one aimed at prompting regime change in Teheran. It's worth noting that this isn't just something to file away in the "wacky pre-war predictions" file, but led directly to the administration massively screwing the pooch on several fronts. First, in Iraq. Whatever it is you're trying to do with Iraq policy, it's always going to be easier to accomplish it if the countries surrounding Iraq -- including Iran and Syria -- are helping you rather than trying to undermine you. Iran and Syria are not, however, run by blithering morons. Thus, when you hint in your public and private statements that one of your ultimate aims in Iraq is to overthrow the governments of Iran and Syria you wind up pushing them heavily into the "undermine" camp and essentially making it impossible to accomplish anything. Second, in Iran. As we now know, soon after the invasion of Iraq, Iran tried to open talks aimed at a broad US-Iranian diplomatic settlement. On the table would be Iran ending its nuclear program and curtailing its support for Palestinian rejectionists, in exchange for the United States lifting sanctions disavowing a regime change policy, and trying to accommodate Iranian interests in Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have been a very good deal for the USA to take, as anyone with a functioning brain to see. Unfortunately, though, functioning brains were in short supply inside the administration which believed that the Iranian domino was about to fall so there was no need to talk settlement. Thus we have a major cause of our current mess in Iraq and of our current mess vis-a-vis Iran all wrapped up in one neat package. The IntersectionNBA analysis meets Middle Eastern geopolitics in John Hollinger's Indiana Pacers preview: Signed Maceo Baston, let Scot Pollard leave. I'm a huge Baston fan based on the numbers he put up the past few years with Maccabi Tel Aviv, and I believe he'll be a productive NBA power forward. He came cheap, too, because he was understandably anxious to find a new employer once Hezbollah started firing rockets over the border. With three capable centers on hand already, Pollard won't be missed much. Not that I follow Israeli basketball, but looking up Baston information online it seems that he found himself playing there in the first place because he's undersized relative to his big man skill set. A sort of classic type of guy who can succeed in college and in Europe but can't do very well in the NBA. Defending South KoreaI was reading Michael O'Hanlon's policy paper on the scary question of what to do if a nuclear-armed regime collapses, and I was struck by this aside: "Pentagon planners have estimated the U.S. forces needed for the defense and ultimate liberation of the ROK to be roughly six ground combat divisions, including Marine and Army units, ten Air Force aircraft wings, and four to five Navy aircraft carrier battle groups – altogether totaling at least half a million Americans under arms." How can that possibly be right? South Korea has twice the population of the DPRK and is far richer. In principle, the ROK ought to be able to defend itself adequately without any outside assistance. An American defense commitment to South Korea makes good sense (we get some influence in the region and it motivates South Korea to help us out with other stuff) even though I think they could get along without us, but there's just no way such an enormous quantity of assistance should be necessary especially because it would, in practice, take an unduly long time to move that much stuff to Korea in the event of a crisis. Meanwhile, South Korea has a $21 billion defense budget to North Korea's $5 billion and we're talking about helping the ROK with a defensive operation. Something doesn't add up. Iran and War PowersIt was brought to my attention recently that Reps. De Fazio and and Hinchey offered an amendment to the 2007 Pentagon appropriations bill that would have specifically barred the administration from launching a military attack on Iran without congressional authorization. 158 members of the House voted for it, but 262 voted against and it failed. In other words, a majority of the House seems to have gone on record in favor of letting the president start wars illegally, a fairly discouraging development. October 5, 2006OutingsDavid Corn reports the existence of "The List" a roster of gay Republican congressional aides. Said staffers are becoming the target of anger from GOP types who believe Mark Foley was being protected by an insidious cabal of gay conservatives who somehow managed to prevent the leadership from doing anything about what was happening. More intriguingly, Corn writes: I have a copy. I'm not going to publish it. For one, I don't know for a fact that the men on the list are gay. And generally I don't fancy outing people--though I have not objected when others have outed gay Republicans, who, after all, work for a party that tries to limit the rights of gays and lesbians and that welcomes the support of those who demonize same-sexers. I've always found there to be something of a generation gap among liberals in this town on "outings" with younger people saying go for it, and our elders being more hesitant. Certainly, I'm all for disclosre. The Republicans don't just "welcome[] the support of those who demonize same-sexers," they've made gay-bashing (along with terrorism) one of the primary emotional foci of conservative politics in America. If liberals got to make up all the rules of the game, homosexuality wouldn't be an issue in American politics. But we don't get to make up the rules unilaterally, and the right has decreed that it is an issue -- a major issue -- and the left needs to play by the rules of the game as it exists. What's more, the very fact that we're even talking about a "list" here is indicative of how far into the fever swamps of homophobia conservatives have dragged us. We're supposed to believe, I guess, that straight men have never behaved lecherously vis-a-vis women they have a supervisory relationship with? If you believe that, I've got a bridge I'd be interested in selling you. NicknamesGilbert Arenas keeps up the weirdo factor by trying to convert his house to simulate high-altitude training effects. In other news, he's contemplating nicknames having settled on "the Stealth" in apparent ignorance of the "Agent Zero" movement in the blogosphere. Put me down as an agent Zero partisan. The relatively unheralded Paul Pierce (a.k.a. the Truth) has somehow managed to acquire the best possible nickname, so I'd advise everyone to stay away from the definite article at this point. "Just a Comma" It's not as funny as Foley-gate, but the ongoing war in Iraq is, obviously, more significant. The president is running around the country slandering Democrats and lying about their stand on his administration's illegal surveillance initiative, while telling people the violence in Iraq will be "just a comma" in the history books. Not, obviously, to the 2,700 and growing dead American soldiers. Not to their wives, husbands, and children. Nor to the thousands more maimed or wounded or their families. Nor to the tens of thousands of dead Iraqis and their families and friends. Or, indeed, to those inspired by the war to join radical terrorist groups, or to those who will be the victims of their future crimes. According to Woodward's book, Bush says he'll continue the war in Iraq even if the only ones left supporting him are Laura and their dog. And, presumably, he means it. Loose talk of winning or losing the war is, at this point, irrelevant. The president has defined our war aims in Iraq purely in terms of continuing the war indefinitely. For him, keeping all of these troops over there and handing the whole shitpile off to his successor is success. Nobody else should find that very comforting. Denials for the AgesRep. Don Sherwood (R-PA): Yes, I cheated on my wife, but I didn't beat my mistress. Setting the "moral values" bar just a little bit lower. IM Ban?Adam Thierer says he's hearing rumors that folks on Capitol Hill are thinking of reacting to Foley-related outrage by introducing a bill that would limited minors' access to instant messenger services. At first blush, that sounds wildly infeasible to me and therefore unlikely to happen. In addition, a profoundly silly notion. Failing UpwardsHilarious as the idea of a Lee Siegel book about internet culture, I find the time frame puzzling. "The end of next March" really isn't very much time to write a book. Oh, well. Opportunity KnocksKurt Campbell and Michael O'Hanlon point out that perceptions of which party is good for national security switch around over time, typically in response to events. The current dissilusionment with the wreck Bush has made of things, in other words, offers up a chance for Democrats to shift around the post-Vietnam perception that they're worse on these things for the long-term. But to seize advantage of the opportunity, Democrats need to try, and outline "the kind of idea-driven agenda, and confident preoccupation with matters of national security that has generally been conceded to the GOP in recent decades." I'm not sure exactly what Campbell and O'Hanlon have in mind, but their general take on this quite right. I would particularly emphasize the confident preoccupation point. One of the GOP's great strengths on the politics of national security over the past five years has, I think, simply been confidence. They act like they expect to win national security debates, and that helps them to win them. Democrats, by contrast, have mostly looked very defensive, a trend that's waned somewhat but still persist to a remarkable degree. But at this point, absolutely everybody can tell that Bush's policies have been a disaster. The first step to securing public faith in a Democratic alternative is simply to say that confidently and without self-consciousness. Darfur All decent people, in my experience, know that the West ought to take military action against the government of Sudan in order to halt the killings in Darfur. Unfortunately, to the best of my (admittedly limited) ability to figure out, such an intervention would actually be a very bad idea. See Alex de Waal and Brad Plumer on this. The fact that intervention advocates like Eric Reeves seem to mostly be assuming that an intervention force wouldn't actually need to fight -- i.e., that the Sudanese would surrender -- strikes me as cause for concern; a classic instance of best-case scenario planning. Another American Loss76ers lose to FC Barcelona, a team whose name clearly indicates that they play soccer. I saw some of the game, and the Sixers were pretty unimpressive, ultimately doomed by absurdly poor free throw shooting but also offering utterly ineffectual defense. Poor VeronicaSommer's got a Variety subscription and informs us that despite the blog hype and the Gilmore Girls lead-in, Veronica Mars still gets very bad ratings. Equally, as she says, what we're basically seeing here is that advertiser-based television has a very hard time serving as a home for high quality programming. On HBO, the name of the game is that some people need to like the shows enough to be willing to pay to watch them. On conventional television networks, you need a larger audience and there are fewer rewards to instilling high levels of audience loyalty. The good news, I think, is that the future will almost certainly involve more fee-for-service programming, which means more good programming. Not necessarily in the form of more subscription-based networks like HBO. Rather, newer technologies (iTunes store, OnDemand, etc.) let people sell individual episodes or subscriptions to particular shows more-or-less directly to the audience. That's the kind of situation where, in principle, you could make a shitload of money from a loyal audience even if the audience wasn't huge. The "bad" ratings for the Veronica Mars premiere, for example, actually included approximately 3.3 million viewers. If you could get, say, half of those people to pay $1 per episode you could earn tens of millios of dollars. And I bet you could get half of them to pay $1 per episode to watch the show. Certainly I would. October 6, 2006Yes, Blame Hastert David Brooks, columnizing from the twighlight zone, informs us that the only people to blame for the Mark Foley scandal are Mark Foley and (yes!) Eve Ensler (really!) -- Denny Hastert gets off the hook entirely: "In discussing the Foley case, the political class, with its unerring instinct for the aspect of any story that will be the least important to average Americans, has shifted attention from Foley’s act to Denny Hastert’s oversight of it. It has fled morality to talk about management." To my way of thinking, this is about 180 degrees off the truth. Frankly, I think the wrongness of Foley's conduct has been widely overstated. What we have actual evidence for strikes me as wrongdoing, yes, but also fairly minor wrongdoing. That said, it certainly raises red flags that something graver might have gone down. It's worth looking into. And this is where Hastert comes in. He and the rest of his leadership team got to glimpse some red flags a long time ago. And instead of looking into it, instead of trying to see what the extent of the problem was, instead of bringing the situation into public view so the public could decide how much this all matters, instead of doing anythig they brushed it all under the rug. Ironically, Brooks describes himself as a defender of an older view of morality in which "we are defined not by our individual choices but by our social roles." But, of course, this is the point. Haster is Speaker of the House of Representatives and is supposed to act like a responsible custodian of the House, not like a two bit goon ready to cover-up God-knows-what in pursuit of a contiued majority. Talk About The WarNew poll out from Time: Only 38% of respondents in the TIME poll now support President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, down from 42% three months ago. A similar number believe that the new Iraqi government will succeed in forming a stable democracy, while 59% believe this is unlikely. Almost two-thirds (65%) of respondents disapprove of President Bush's handling of the war, while 54% believe he "deliberately misled" Americans in making his case for war — a figure that has increased by 6 points over the past year. So, okay, my inclination has been to urge Democrats to demonstrate some political courage and simply state the bald truth: Invading Iraq was a bad idea, the president garnered support for the idea by lying a lot, and the mission there is not going to succeed. Since it turns out that this is actually what most people believe, though, it doesn't seem like it would even require too much courage. Just go out there and say it. Let me note that even though Time and most media polls are representing the GOP's problems as Foley-induced, the Pew Center has conducted the only poll that's methodologically well-designed to measure the Foley Effect and they found it to be very modest -- Iraq, not Foley, is dragging the GOP down. All the more reason to keep talking about it. New BloggingheadsIf you want more of my thoughts on the future of television, look no further than this segment new on BloggingHeads.tv where I'm talking with Dan Drezner. We're also talking North Korea and grand strategy among other appealing topics. The Case for RetributionKevin Drum nicely breaks down the options facing a potential Democratic congress (or even one house of congress) into two ideal types: (a) acting as the party of moderation and focusing on bipartisan "good government" proposals, or I think Kevin goes wrong in saying that which should be preferred "depends on whether you think there are lots of moderate, centrist voters in America who will respond positively to Ignatius's wholesome message." At the end of the day, I think Democrats should pursue an agenda of aggressive, albeit focused, efforts to root out malfeasance even if such an agenda has less appeal than the alternative. The crux of the matter is that public opinion, while obviously important, has only a limited and attenuated relationship to policy outcomes. Structural factors matter and, in particular, the presence of a real and palpable rot within important quarters of the conservative movement matters. Rooting that rot out is crucial to the long-term health of the country and the long-term prospects for progressive change -- more important than pre-positioning for the next election cycle. To get a look at what I mean, one of the noteworthy factors about the current situation is the extent to which the malefactors are people who really should have been permanently driven out of public life for sins committed long ago in the 1970s and 80s. But instead of being so driven, they were merely pushed out of office only to return, like zombies, eventually accruing more power and influence than ever before. This needs to stop. No set of tactics is going to prevent "the Republicans" from winning future elections and regaining control over the levers of power at some point. That's how two-party politics work. But it is possible to imagine a future in which specific individuals can never take office again, and the networks that bind them to each other are utterly disrupted. To The Victor...The LA Times had an article yesterday about the limited influence of payroll size on baseball outcomes. Money differentials do matter, accounting for about 20 percent of the variance in MLB win-totals, but they don't really matter all that much. And, well, good for A's fans. Nevertheless, it's hard to avoid noticing that this implies that baseball teams are, as a rule, managed extremely poorly. Absent a salary cap, the teams with the most money to spend ought to be able to perform much better than the teams that spend much less. Moneyball is all about Billy Beane's ability to use statistics to identify some player-attributes that were undervalued in the baseball labor market and assemble quality teams at bargain-basement prices. That strategy depends, however, on significant inefficiencies existing in the first place. And the inefficiencies need to be quite large, since the payroll differentials are enormous -- the Yankees' salary total is 2.7 times the median. On top of that, you're looking at a kind of meta-inefficiency. The owners prepared to shell out the highest amount for players ought to be able to also outbid stingier owners for the services of the best GMs, scouts, managers, etc. In a perfect environment, in other words, differential management-ability to entrench, rather than mitigate, payroll-differentials. That all these inefficiencies exist winds up being good for the fans, but it's still rather odd. October 7, 2006The Talented Mr. FakhravarLaura Rozen has a great article about new superstar Iranian dissident Amir Abbas Fakhravar. He's not the opposition figure with the most credibility or the most support inside Iran. He is, however, the one with the most neocon-friendly worldview: Iran’s best-known dissident, journalist Akbar Ganji, rejected invitations to meet with administration officials on a recent U.S. visit, and asked instead to see the United Nations’ Kofi Annan and Noam Chomsky. “I advocate change of the regime in Iran,” Ganji told me in July. “But that regime must be changed by Iranians themselves.” According to Rozen, Fakhravar seems to be a bit of a grifter, a crook, and a flim-flam man which, of course, makes him a perfect match for his newfound buddies. In short, he's the new Chalabi. Like Chalabi, there's even some sign that he's actually working with the Iranian security services. "Stand Principled" -- Without Principles!Marc Grinberg, Rachel Kleinfeld, and Matthew Spence from the Truman National Security Project take to the virtual pages of The Democratic Strategist to offer up their take on the politics of national security. Elements of what they say I agree with. Their suggested Iran messaging, however, is redolent of the I-want-to-pull-my-hair-out aspect of the "decent left" If any issue should arouse the passion of Democrats, it is the spread of nuclear weapons to a radical Iranian government. Iran is a nation that stones women, publicly executes homosexuals, suppresses its minorities, and has violated the most basic human rights we fight for as Democrats. Allowing Iran to build a nuclear weapon would strengthen this government's hand against their own people. And nuclear proliferation--which would spread from Iran to the rest of the region--poses the greatest human rights abuse of all: threatening to destroy millions of lives in a war or a nuclear accident. This is, how shall I say it, um, "utterly vacuous." It's a message in support of, what, exactly? Bombs away? Messaging, obviously, is an important thing in the world. But it's genuinely the case that before you think about the best message on some issue, you need to think a little bit about the policy. You're trying to determine a message that sells the policy. Here, we seem to be simply trying to talk tough while not committing the speaker to anything in particular. But if you don't think the United States should bomb Iran, than simply ramping up the level of Iran-related paranoia is a terrible idea; you're only going to box yourself into an impossible political corner if the bombs drop. Alternatively, if you do support a bombs away policy, it would be better to just say so. I like Heather Hurlburt's ideas a lot better. The Departed I went to see The Departed last night with a bunch of folks, and I have to say I'm almost embarassed by how much I liked it. Normally, I'd like to strongly recommend a quirky small film or maybe make a strident case on behalf of some apparent shock or geek-out over a comic book adaptation, but this movie star-laden major studio production from super-famous director Martin Scorsese is, well, really excellent. I have an extremely low tolerance for 150 minute films, but this one managed to move along nicely with the last portion of it flirting with being too much while ultimately justifying itself. Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and (especially) Mark Wahlberg all turn-in absolutely first-rate performances and various cops. Matt Damon's limited acting abilities are very well-deployed to craft a creepy, affectless, soulless monster lurking beneath the skin of a good-looking nice guy. William Monahan did a fantastic job of adapting Infernal Affairs in a way that brilliantly takes what's really a very Hong Kong-style story and makes it utterly Boston. Genuinly hilarious moments emerge amidst a fundamentally deeply unfunny storyline. The only weakness that really impedes one's enjoyment of the film is that Jack Nicholson really gets to be a bit too much at times, and the final shot of the film is shockingly groan-inducing. When you step back and think about it, I'm not sure the set-up really makes any sense, but it's executed nicely in a way that prevents one from thinking too much about this. Also, it features the Dropkick Murphys' utterly awesome song, "I'm Shipping up to Boston". |
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