Gettysburg Address: The PowerPoint
One of my favorite random internet things, here for the 173rd anniversary of Lincoln's speech.
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November 19, 2006 - November 25, 2006 Archives
November 19, 2006
Reporting, Please
Washington Post takes a look at the Democratic agenda.
The necessity of some GOP votes, combined with the austere fiscal climate, has influenced how Democrats plan to proceed in their first weeks. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the next speaker of the House, has said that one of the first domestic issues she will bring up will be an increase in the minimum wage by $2.10 per hour, to $7.25. The cost of that would largely be borne by private employers, not the government. President Bush has supported similar proposals, said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman.
No doubt Dana Perino did say that, but it's not, you know, true. The "similar" proposals Bush has supported are "compromises" that involve combining small increases in the minimum wage with giant tax cuts for rich people.
One! Last! Push!
I have absolutely no idea what the people advocating for "one last push" in Iraq, with an influence of however many additional troops can be temporarily "surged" into Baghdad are thinking. One last push for what? A higher troop concentration in some particular area might get whatever disfavored elements are around to lie low or head elsewhere for a while, but it's not as if we're going to have the mapower to go house-by-house through Iraq and scrub the country of weapons. The various armed factions in Iraq are far too embedded, socially and politically, in the fabric of Iraqi society. This just seems like a desperation pundit play to avoid admitting that the "left" position -- we should leave Iraq -- is, in fact, the correct one.
Iran: It's Back
Good times; the return of the Iran debate. People should listen to Ray Takeyh rather than, say, Joshua Muravchik. Interestingly, Muravchik is willing to follow neoconservatism's war is always the answer approach to some outside-the-box conclusions:
After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917, a single member of Britain's Cabinet, Winston Churchill, appealed for robust military intervention to crush the new regime. His colleagues weighed the costs — the loss of soldiers, international derision, revenge by Lenin — and rejected the idea.
Apparently, this was a bad idea on the part of the British government. And, no doubt, Soviet Communism proved to be a very bad thing indeed. On the other hand, the western powers actually did intervene, sending troops into Russia and giving aid to the White forces in the Russian Civil War. It didn't work out. To be sure, they could have tried intervening even more forcefully (the neocon method of saving all failed military ventures) but I don't see any real reason to think this could have worked out. Assemble a huge army (in the immediate aftermath of world war one, mind you) to march on Moscow and then . . . what? Install a puppet regime? And occupy the country -- a big country -- for how long, exactly? And, needless to say, it's not as if efforts to conquer Russia have some kind of brilliant historical track record.
November 20, 2006
Lessons Learned
Jon Chait is right, the conservative theory that the GOP lost power due to insufficiently dogmatic adherence to "small government" dogma is bizarre. It's true that deviationism earned the Republicans a lot of criticism from conservatives, but there's almost no evidence of conservative abandonment and a wealth of evidence suggesting moderate voters turned -- hard -- against the GOP, which they would have done earlier if not for the deviations. But the madness seems to grow more entrenched as I read in the NY Times that "Republicans close to the White House say Mr. Rove has been arguing that the White House needs to shore up its standing with conservatives, whose support will be crucial to rebuild Mr. Bush's popularity and ultimately give him some leverage."
Bush's standing with conservatives, however, remains plenty high. It's his standing with everyone else that's in the toilet.
Slandering Human Rights Watch
Aryeh Neier, formerly of Human Rights Watch and currently of the Open Society Institute, had a great article in The New York Review of Books a couple of issues ago about the Lobby That Shall Not Be Named's scandalous campaign against Human Rights Watch and its executive director, Kenneth Roth, in the wake of the Lebanon War. Having issues reports condemning crimes committed by Hezbollah as well as ones critical of Israeli conduct, the group got the following treatment:
The Perils of Authenticity
Kriston was playing The Vaselines this morning, which reminded me that though I like "Jesus Don't Want Me For a Sunbeam," "Molly's Lips,"and (especiallly) "Son of a Gun" that in all three instances I think the Nirvana cover (the former on Unplugged the latter two on Incesticide) is superior to the original and this also strikes me as a crappy opinion to have. Even worse, as a general matter, I tend to really prefer Vaselines-style bands with woman singers. Now and again, I'll try to convince myself that this is wrong I really do like the more authentic originals better, but it's just not true, damnit. At the end of the day, I just really, really, really like Nirvana, which also seems like a pretty lame view to me.
We're Doomed! Doomed!
Neal McCluskey complains that "Federal spending on elementary and secondary education leapt from $43.8 billion in FY 2000 to $68.0 billion in FY 2005, a 55 percent increase, and NCLB imposed a whole new strategy of unprecedented federal control onto the schools. Yet, somehow, nothing changed." Why control for inflation or population growth -- after all, raw aggregates are just as accurate useless in this context. What's more, the story McCluskey links to to prove that "nothing changed" actually said that under No Child Left Behind "The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a battery of reading and math tests administered to thousands of students in every state, showed some rising scores for all ethnic groups, and the black-white score gap narrowed in a statistically significant way for fourth-grade math. But on fourth-grade reading, and on eighth-grade reading and math, the black-white and Hispanic-white gaps were statistically unchanged from the early 1990s."
So it's less that "nothing happened" than that very minor progress was made toward narrowing the racial achievement gap and that this occurred in the context of generally rising scores. The achievement gap, in other words, would have narrowed were it not for the fact that white kids, inconveniently, also improved their performance at the same time African-American and Latino kids did. Since it's not really viable, politically (or ethically?), to deliberately retard efforts to educate white kids, it's intrinsically difficult to close achievement gaps since the sort of people who were already doing well might always get better. Nevertheless, getting better overall educational outcomes in exchange for higher overall education spending is not much of a damning condemnation of liberal demands for more resources.
Last, no word on aggregate education spending is complete without noting that primary school teaching doesn't benefit from many technology-driven productivity gains since it intrinsically involves high levels of personal supervision. As a result, we should expect education spending to need to increase in real per capita terms over time merely to maintain the same quality level.
On Credibility
Josh Marshall says that "the argument about the need to maintain 'credibility' when deciding whether to withdraw from an ill-fated engagement is not one that, I think, can be dismissed out of hand," before dismissing it in a non-out-of-hand kind of way. I think it sort of can be dismissed out of hand. Credibility isn't an all-purpose commodity and, indeed, it's not especially fungible. Whether or not the United States "has credibility" is rarely the issue, rather what matters is whether or not particular threats or promises we make are seen as credible.
This, in turn, is going to overwhelmingly be determined by our objective capacity to fulfill promises rather than by subjective assessments of our badassness. Under the circumstances, it's very hard to see what kind of credibility benefit accrues to us from keeping the bulk of the US Army's fighting strength in Iraq. Objectively, that only diminishes our capacity to do things in the world. What would really increase our credibility vis-a-vis, say, Iran would be for our threats to actually be credible the odds that we can somehow trick Teheran into believing we have the capacity to invade and conquer their country seem poor.
Oh, The Humanity!
I've been having a hard time coming up with what to say about Wire 47 since the episode was basically so fantastic that I have nothing to grouse about. The signature moment, on reflection, has to be Chris' savage beating-to-death of Bug's dad. The distinctive thing about the Marlo-Chris-Snoop troika from the beginning is that they've presented themselves, from the beginning (i.e., Marlo's hilarious "what's you name again?" query in the back seat of his car after meeting the girl who was supposed to seduce him and lead him to his demise) as essentially inhuman characters. Chris' breakdown, monstrous as it was, was also human. Killing that dude was more than a job to him -- it was vengeance for some demons in his own past; a murder that, perversely, makes Chris seem more normal and less like the ultimate drug soldier.
It was, however, just that inhuman quality that had made the Stanfield crew so effective. Chris not only lost his head, but violated the corpse-hiding procedure that's been integral to keeping the heat off.
West Baltimore, as we see, is trapped in a spiral. Weak, soft kids like Namond are too week, too human to avoid the game. The strong ones (Michael) resist its temptations better but are also much better prospects who get more attractive offers and wind up signing up at the end. But even the best, most professional among them (Chris) have their moments of humanity and trip up. Meanwhile, the descent of Major Crimes into ineptitude is frustrating, but having seen Marlo rise from the ashes of the Barskdale crew we know perfectly well that Colonel Daniels and a revivified CID will only open up space for a new player if they ever do bear down. Everyone is, in essence, doomed. Which is, it seems, the general POV of the show as we see as well in the Hall plotline.
From the beginning, though, there's been a counternarrative: Prop Joe always wins. He tricks Avon, brings in a ringer, and wins his basketball game. He has an out-of-town "product" hookup facilitated by a smuggler who enjoys protection from the FBI. The Baltimore PD never focuses on him no matter how central he becomes to the Charm City drug trade -- indeed, it's not clear they even know who he is. Marlo comes to him for help as to those fleeing from Marlo. Is Joe just lucky, or has he figured something out nobody else on either side of the thin blue line knows?
Competitive Balance in the NBA
The idea that the NBA needs to implement revenue sharing in order to help small market teams and thereby maintain, restore, or create competitive balance is, I think, obviously absurd. The NBA really is one of the least-balanced major sports leagues around. But small market disadvantages have nothing to do with it. Neither the post-Ewing Knicks, the post-Jordan Bulls, nor post-Shaq Lakers have been able to leverage large markets into NBA success. The Spurs in tiny San Antonio (37 on the Nielson media markets list) are the most consistently successful team of recent years. Detroit is a modest-sized market at 11, as are the current champs in Miami at 17.
I think the main thing about competitiveness in the NBA is that as these dudes note there are very, very few people in the world with the appropriate physique to be NBA-quality big men. As a result the variance in big man quality is gigantic and this is semi-intrinsic to the sport. At the same time, the max salary rule ensures that the very best players in the league are underpaid, as are the very youngest stars. So there's a lot of essentially luck-based imbalance (i.e., Dwayne Wade is worth max money, but LeBron is worth even more money, but they both make the same, so Cleveland gets a better player but has the same cap room to find a supporting cast) playing out. Then, the combination of guaranteed contracts and the salary cap means that it's hard to undue the consequences of management fuckups so that even a great hoops genius probably couldn't turn, say, the Knicks around.
Try Everything -- But Not That!
Leon Wieseltier on Iraq with some emphasis added:
We cannot quit on moral grounds, because we have an obligation to assist the secular democracy-builders in Iraq, the heroes in the wreckage, whose cause is not yet lost, and we have an obligation to protect the Kurds. And we cannot quit on strategic grounds, because of the gains to Iran and to the terrorist international. So what should we do? Briefly, anything and everything. An increase in troop deployments for the mastery of Baghdad, upon which a great deal depends (if order is not established, nothing good will be established); reform of the Iraqi military, or of what passes for the Iraqi military; redeployment to less provocative locations; a federal arrangement of the Iraqi state; an international conference (but about Iraq, not Palestine); an attempt to flip Syria to our side, which is not beyond the diplomatic imagination; anything and everything. If we leave, or if we stay the bleeding course, things will get even worse.
This is all a pony hunt as far as I'm concerned so on some level, whatever. That said, suppose Bush were to go pony hunting at a regional conference wherein Syria agrees to "flip . . . to our side" and various other actors agree to do ponyish things but they say that in order to sell it to their publics and in order to prove American bona fides they need us to, say, get the IDF out of Gaza. That's off the table? Iraq is so important and leaving so bad that we should do anything -- anything -- to salvage some scrap of dignity their, but Israel is totally off the table for discussion in any respect. Total US backing for whatever Israel is just beyond all possible trading off? As I say, hypothetical pony hunt outcomes aren't my top concern, but the general principle here seems obviously pernicious.
November 21, 2006
Big Coin Wins Again
As everyone knows, the way to get people to use dollar coins would be to stop printing $1 bills. This, apparently, would save the federal government a considerable sum since coins last a long time, and $1 bills have a very brief lifespan. The question, then, is why this new presidential coin plan? Coverage of the new coins tends to start with a lot of talk about the Mint doing, thinking, or hoping this or that as if the US Mint is for some reason being run by people who don't understand coins and don't understand that the $1 coin is doomed as long as the $1 bill lives. Deeper in, though, you learn that "The coins were authorized by the 2005 Presidential Coin Act, which requires the minting of dollar coins commemorating the service of former United States presidents in the order in which they served."
In other words, it wasn't the mint's idea at all -- it came from congress. But why would congress pass a law like that? Well, I have some familiarity with this topic and my understanding is that, in essence, the idea was being pushed by mining interests hoping to sell the government some more of their metal. They hired some lobbyists, the North Dakota delegation and Ben Nighthorse Campbell put up an ultimately successful fight to secure the long-term future of the Sacagewa Dollar, and ta-da! your presidential commemorative coins will be here shortly. Similarly, it's the zinc (or something) lobby that keeps the penny in existence. Only in America.
Iraqis Say Go
Via Kevin Drum, new polling from the Project on International Policy Attitudes indicates that Iraqis would overwhelmingly like to see the United States leave Iraq on a definite schedule within a reasonably short time frame. The full report is here. "Seven out of ten Iraqis overall—including both the Shia majority (74%) and the Sunni minority (91%)—say they want the United States to leave within a year." In Baghdad, the center of our current military efforts and the place where fears of an upsurge in violence were the US to leave are most realistic (Baghdad residents share this concern), support for departure is, if anything, somewhat stronger with 80 percent of the Baghdad Shia saying they'd like to see us leave.
As Kevin notes, one can debate whether this is really the correct policy judgment on the part of Iraqis. Perhaps in some sense things would be better if they simply welcomed their foreign overlords.
That said, as he also points out, it really doesn't matter. Whatever it might be possible for US forces to achieve in principle, we're not going to be able to do anything useful in the face of this kind of overwhelming opposition to our very presence. People won't cooperate with our troops meaningfully or be interested in American views on what kind of steps the Iraqi government should or should not be taking. Most of all, you certainly can't build a democracy with an unpopular occupying army staying in a foreign country in the face of hostile public attitudes. Insofar as the Iraqi government does cooperate with our forces and does take our suggestions, it's only going to find itself discredited by association with us. The situation is untenable, and we need to leave. What's more, we need to start planning to leave as soon as possible so we can figure out a plan that's orderly and reasonably safe, rather than finding ourselves needing to do it in a panic 30 months from now.
Time for an International Conference?
The government of Israel has, obviously, been controlling a large parcel of land it conquered from Jordan for several decades now -- the West Bank -- land that is presumed to be the future location of an independent state of Palestine. At the same time, Israel has been building settlements on that land -- freestanding small- or medium-sized towns as well as what amount to suburbs of Jerusalem, populated by Jews who, unlike their Muslim or Christian Arab neighbors, are citizens of Israel with rights, etc. But in addition to parcels of land being controlled by governments -- in this case, first the United Kingdom, then Jordan, now Israel -- they are owned by individuals. So where did the settlers get the land? The Israeli government has always claimed it's been legitimately obtained through purchase. According to this new study by Peace Now it isn't true.
They obtained files leaked from the 2004 database of the Civil Administration, in charge of non-military aspects of West Bank administration, and concluded that fully 39 percent of settlement land area is privately owned by Palestinians. Or, perhaps, "was owned" since, obviously, it's been taken from them. See further coverage by Steve Erlanger in The New York Times and Yair Sheleg in Haaretz. I, for one, look forward to the explanation of how Erlanger, Sheleg, their editors, the Peace Now Settlement Watch team, and the dudes in the Israeli government who leaked this to them are all anti-semites.
Arab Winter
"Just recently we have had the Lebanese revolution, the Egyptian announcement about electoral changes, the Iraqi elections, the Afghan elections," wrote Charles Krauthammer in the spring of 2005. "Kuwait has just extended suffrage to women, and Syria has announced, however disingenuously, that they are moving toward legalizing political parties, purging the ruling Baath Party, sponsoring free municipal elections in 2007, and formally endorsing a market economy." He concluded: "What we have seen in the last six months has been simply astonishing -- well, astonishing to the critics." . . ."There is a pathology, a historical pathology," explained New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz, "that [Bush] has attacked with unprecedented vigor and with unprecedented success." That pathology was "the political culture of the Middle East, which the president may actually have changed."
And, indeed, things have changed. As Sabrina Tavernise reported in Monday's New York Times about the centerpiece of the U.S.-orchestrated Mid-East transformation, "after months of apparently random sectarian violence the pattern has become one of attack and counterattack, with Sunni militants staging what commanders call 'spectacular' strikes and Shiite militias retaliating with abductions and murders of Sunnis."
Welcome to the long, dark Arab winter.
So there.
Speaking of the Arab Spring
Pierre Gemayal assassinated in Lebanon. Members of the anti-Syrian bloc currently controlling the opposition blame Syria. Syria and members of the opposition deny involvement, claiming it was a provocation designed to destabilize Lebanon. One hopes this doesn't prefigure a return to civil war conditions.
November 22, 2006
The Clampdown
The great state of Georgia has decided to make life tough for sex offenders -- very tough: "The roughly 10,000 sex offenders living in Georgia have been forbidden to live within 1,000 feet of a school, playground, church or school bus stop. Taken together, the prohibitions place nearly all the homes in some counties off-limits -- amounting, in a practical sense, to banishment." According to the leader of the Georgia House, this isn't a real enforcement strategy, rather the idea "is to make it so onerous on those that are convicted of these offenses . . . they will want to move to another state."
The trouble, as Alex Tabarrok notes, is that lots of these people aren't dangers to anyone: "the list includes 'a 26-year-old woman who was caught engaging in oral sex when she was in high school, and a mother of five who was convicted of being a party to a crime of statutory rape because, her indictment alleged, she did not do enough to stop her 15-year-old daughter's sexual activity.'" Obviously, though, no politician wants the "soft on sex offenders" label on him, so nobody will stop this.
Shocking Turn
Who could have guessed that Joe Lieberman would wind up hiring conservative Republican and hard-core warmonger Marshall Wittman to be his new spokesperson? I look forward to Wittman's and Lieberman's efforts to demonstrate their interest in humanitarianism by trying to get other people to risk their lives in an effort to kill lots of Iranian people.
UPDATE: Mark Schmitt notes the possibility of a McCain/Lieberman combo third party run peddling the line "We were each rejected by the ideological extremists in our parties, therefore we represent the true forgotten center of American politics." And, as Mark says, they'll be in the "center" if by "center" you mean "on the far, far right on national security issues."
UPDATE II: Ed Kilgore comments: "The Moose became a passionate advocate for Lieberman's primary and general-election campaigns in no small part because he sincerely believes both parties are in danger of abandoning the political center, and quite frankly because he is happiest free of either party's yoke." Seriously, though. In what way does Joe Lieberman represent the center? In McCain's case it's clear that he's the furthest right Republican on defense and use of force issues. And as best I can tell, Lieberman holds . . . the same views. Which, I mean, is fine -- I have extreme views on some issues, too, but just because mainstream Republicans and mainstream Democrats both reject something doesn't make it centrist; it could just be fringey and foolish.
Of Chickens and Hawks
I think Kevin Drum is misconstruing the force of the point Lawrence O'Donnel is making here. Kevin's right to say it doesn't make sense to say that only veterans are allowed to have opinions about questions of war and peace (democracy and all that) or that only veterans are allowed to favor military deployments (since most people aren't veterans, this would just mean the military could never be deployed), but I don't think that's what's at issue here. There are two different sound points in the chickenhawk neighborhood.
One is just that it's a way of calling bullshit on people's insistence that doing this or that is vitally necessary to the security of the country and the world. If you say "The war in Iraq is going downhill, but it's not hopeless yet and it's vitally important for America to succeed -- failure is not an option" I think it's fair to ask in response why you're not putting any skin in the game. Are you volunteering? Encouraging your son, daughter, or little brother to volunteer? The interns working in your office? The college students you might be invited to address on this or that topic? If you're not doing any of those things -- if you don't think you could look a 20 year-old kid you care about in the eyes and tell him with a straight face that it's vitally important for the world that he sign up to fight -- that seems like a good indication that you don't really believe the things you claim to believe. As with any hypocrisy gambit, the reverse might be true -- you might just lack the courage of your convictions rather than lacking conviction -- but it seems likely to me that you're probably just fronting convictions you haven't really thought-through.
The other thing is just the annoying rhetoric of strength, courage, and toughness. Actually punching some dude who hassles you on the street is genuinely tougher and braver (though possibly also dumber) than trying to back down and de-escalate the situation. Advocating that someone else punch some dude who hassles you on the street is not. It's just an opinion. Maybe a right one, maybe a wrong one, but no braver, tougher, stronger, or more courageous than giving the reverse advice. Similarly, volunteering to fight "Islamofascism" in Iraq requires significantly more toughness than does writing blog posts about how troops should be withdrawn. But blogging about how more troops should be sent to fight "Islamofascism" in Iraq isn't a tougher, braver thing to do than is blogging the reverse.
Height Fun Facts
A friend of a friend with access to the National Health and Nutrition Examinations Survey data looked into the "how many seven footers are there?" question for me and found that the six years of the survey have counted over 3,000 people of whom . . . none are taller than 6 foot 8 inches. Which is to say that "big man" sized people are, in fact, extremely rare. What's more, according to an exhibit I saw at the Mutter Museum last weekend, a majority of people taller than about 6'10" actually suffer from pathological pituitary gland disorders (Sun Ming Ming, for example) that make them ill-suited to be athletes.
The point of this, you'll recall, was to try and estimate what proportion of age-appropriate seven footers are professional basketball players. Perhaps the question should be further refined to include information about this pituitary business. A few super-tall people who, as best I can tell, aren't basketball players are Leonid Stadnyk, Xi Shun, and Ajaz Ahmed. Angus MacAskill at 7'9" was apparently the tallest person recorded without a serious growth disorder, but having been born in Scotland in 1825, basketball wasn't an option.
On The Uncontroversial Subject of Religion...
Ross Douthat tries to run an argument that's always puzzled me -- the idea that we can infer the truth of theism from the fact that theism is widely believed:
am, however, consistently puzzled by the resistance, whether it's among my friends and neighbors or the Sam Harrises of the world, to any consideration of the notion that religious experience might be like most other widespread human experiences - which is to say, a response to something that's actually out there. [...] As soon as homo sapiens developed consciousness, we became conscious of (what seems to be) a numinous reality interwoven with our own; it's just possible, surely, that we started experiencing the numinous because it happens to be real.
The trouble, I think, is that one thing just about everyone should be prepared to agree about is that most peoples' religious beliefs are false. As you can see in the handy chart I stole from this site, there's just too much diversity in religious belief. Whatever the right thing to believe is, most people don't believe it. At best, you can combine the Christian and Muslim blocks (and the trivial number of Jews) to form a very slight majority in form of some form of monotheism. Even here, though, the folk practices of many Catholics (and unless I'm mistaken, Orthodox Christians and Shiite Muslims as well) has strong polytheistic elements. It's only a kind of rhetorical overreach on the part of atheists -- pitting "religion" versus "not religion" as the key disagreement -- that creates the appearance of a large majority in favor of "religion."
There's clearly a significant human predilection for not-supported-by-science beliefs of various sorts -- in the existence of a god or gods, astrology, fortune-telling, alien visits to earth, the healing power of crystals, etc. -- but there's no particular convergence of these beliefs on anything in particular. Meanwhile, on many of the particular question you might ask about religious subjects, atheists are going to be in the majority. Like most people on earth, atheists don't believe that Jesus Christ died for man's sins. Similarly, just like most people, atheists don't believe that Muhammed was Allah's greatest prophet or that the Hidden Imam will return. And, again, like most people atheists don't believe that you'll be reborn on earth after death in a new body.
November 23, 2006
Happy Thanksgiving
Whatever else may be true, you can almost certainly at least be thankful that George W. Bush hasn't tried to liberate your country.
Hollinger Versus Berri
It's an NBA stats throwdown, as David Berri critiques John Hollinger's PER formula, backed up by Malcolm Gladwell. Hollinger fires back saying Berri's misunderstood how PER is calculated. On the issue at hand -- the "break even point" for shooting efficiency -- the two formulas are actually very close, Hollinger is only slightly more forgiving of missed shots. This long post by Dan Rosembaum on Wins Produced gets into some interesting business; Rosenbaum's point seven, dealing with defense, seems especially persuasive.
Obviously, as problematic as trying to quantify individual contributions to team offense based on box score numbers may be, quantifying individual contributions to defense is way more problematic. One point Berri makes time and again on his blog is that payroll size and wins correlate only very weakly in the NBA even though individual players' statistical production is fairly consistent from year to year. That, he points out, is good evidence that conventional thinking about player evaluation is often mistaken. So far as it goes, that seems correct, but my guess what be that an awful lot of the mis-evaluating just has to do with the extreme difficulty of assessing people's contributions to team defense. Beyond defensive rebounding, the numbers available strike me as next-to-worthless; giving people credit for steals, for example, doesn't make much sense unless we understand something about steal rates and the costs of failed steal attempts.
Malajube
Tom's right, Tromp L'oeil by Malajube seems pretty great to me after a couple of listens. I also checked out their previous album Le Compte Complet briefly and wasn't really as taken with it, but it probably deserves a bit more thought. I will say, though, that unlike most people I know, I really do care about song lyrics which makes it a bit hard for me to get into foreign language tunes. These guys are French Canadians so I can understand the occassional line, but mostly it's jibberish. Maybe if I see the words written down somewhere I can figure it out.
North American Union
Tom Tancredo accuses George W. Bush of having a secret plan to replace the USA with a "North American Union" of some sort. Personally, I favor a union, but my idea was always to give it a corporate-style name like AmeriCAN.
November 24, 2006
Memos from the Antipodes
John Quiggin tells us a bit about how "Australia now has its own version of the Downing Street memos, dating back to 28 February 2002. That’s when Trevor Flugge, Chairman of our (massively corrupt) grain trading monopoly AWB was told of the invasion of Iraq, and of Australia’s planned participation by our Ambassador to the UN*, John Dauth who even predicted that readmitting weapons inspectors would only produce a short delay." This grain trading monopoly, incidentally, seems like a very poor idea based on Quiggin's description.
I See...
Huh. It's interesting to see Charles Krauthammer just saying this explicitly: "Look. Harry Truman used to tell derisive Jewish jokes. Richard Nixon said nasty things about Jews in government and elsewhere. Who cares? Truman and Nixon were the two greatest friends of the Jews in the entire postwar period: Truman secured them a refuge in the state of Israel, and Nixon saved it from extinction during the Yom Kippur War."
Well, I'm not sure any especially terrible consequences flowed from Truman's Jewish jokes, but, um, I care about stuff like that. Being a Jewish person living in the United States of America, it would trouble me for the President of the United States to be an anti-semite. Indeed, Nixon's anti-semitism seems to have had real consequences, being part-and-parcel of his paranoia and proclivity for witch hunts. The idea that this is all made okay because someone was nice to Israel is pretty weird. Beyond weird, of course, it's the flipside of the theory that anyone who criticizes Israel must be an anti-semite.
Ah, Research
Is this really legal? Researchers are looking to administer "cocaine, and either Progesterone, Flutamide, or Premarin" to "healthy men and women ages 21-35 who have used cocaine occasionally" and will pay you $425 for your trouble. I seem to recall laws against stockpiling and distributing cocaine.
November 25, 2006
Kevin Garnett
I agree with Bill Simmons. From a fan's perspective, it would be good to see Kevin Garnett demand a trade. By the numbers, he's one of the greatest players of all time, but that contention can't really be put to the test unless he's put in a situation with some decent teammates where he can show his stuff at the highest levels. What's more, the 'wolves are so mired in crappiness that there's a strong risk his skills will simply be lost to history -- a name future generations of fans won't even recognize.
The most logical candidate would seem to be the Bulls. Chicago lacks big contracts, except for Ben Wallace, so it's a bit hard to make the salaries match. That said, I think it works if Chicago gives up PJ Brown's expiring deal, Tyrus Thomas, Ben Gordon, Mike Sweetney, Luol Deng, and the Knicks' 2007 pick. That gives Minnesota cap relief, a high draft pick, a top prospect, and a few goodish young players. It leaves the Bulls with what I think would be a contending starting lineup of Wallace, Garnett, Nocioni, Duhon, and Hinrich with Malik Allen, Thabo Sefosha, and Adrian Griffin off the pench. Chicago would presumably need to find a backup point guard somewhere to sign.
Training
If you ask me, the problems with the training programs for the Iraqi security forces has essentially nothing to do with the number or quality of American trainers assigned to the task. Rather, it's a mistake to see the problem as primarily one of organizational competence on the part of the security forces. After all, however bad the US-run training program may be, it's hardly as if Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias have access to some radically better training program. The problems are problems of politics, morale, and motivation. "Iraq’s government has yet to confront the country’s militias," because the government is dependent on the same political forces and actors who sponsor the militias, not because the police need a better training program.
The Undervotes
An Orlando Sentinel analysis of votes that didn't get counted in the race for Katherine Harris' old House seat determines that they were not only in a Democrat-friendly country, but in specifically Democrat-friendly precincts:
The group of nearly 18,000 voters that registered no choice in Sarasota's disputed congressional election solidly backed Democratic candidates in all five of Florida's statewide races, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of ballot data shows.Among these voters, even the weakest Democrat -- agriculture-commissioner candidate Eric Copeland -- outpaced a much-better-known Republican incumbent by 551 votes.
The trend, which continues up the ticket to the race for governor and U.S. Senate, suggests that if votes were truly cast and lost -- as Democrat Christine Jennings maintains -- they were votes that likely cost her the congressional election.
This is, shall we say, suspect. Whether or not you're looking at any deliberate foul play here, the odds that these 18,000 people simply chose not to vote in a House race but did vote in all these races has to be judged extremely small. A screwed-up vote-counting process -- however exactly it got screwed up -- cost the Democrats the race.
The Ever-Tempting Chuck Hagel
Chuck Hagel continues to prove he can be an impressive thinker and analyst when he chooses to. The question continues to be: Can he be an impressive United States Senator? As a member of the majority, he never seemed to find ways to use the power of his office effectively to reorient national policy. As a member of the minority, can and will he find ways to forge coalitions with liberal Democrats to push the kind of foreign policy he's interested in? Can he tempt other Republican members to throw Bush overboard? Little in his record inspires confidence that smart op-eds will lead to effective action, but he remains a very tempting figure the Republican who, from time to time, sees these national security matters much more clearly than his colleagues. And where's Dick Lugar gone off to these days?
Subpoenas
Okay, good. I expected the big post-victory news to be about administration officials finally feeling the heat to comply with Democratic document requests lest they face a torrent of subpoenas and requests for sworn testimony. Instead, the House leadership fight took central stage. But here comes the oversight rushing back in. Sadly, an awful lot of our Senate Committee chairs (Lieberman, Conrad, Baucus, Rockefellet come to mind) strike me as fairly useless. And then there's Joe Biden. I'm all about Carl Levin at Armed Services, but the Armed Services roster includes an awful lot of timid hawks (Lieberman, Clinton, Bayh, both Nelsons, Reed) so I'm not sure how much they'll get done unless Jim Webb manages to give this crew a shot in the arm. That leaves the House, of course, but also Pat Leahy whose very good and leads a feisty Democratic team on the committee. Early returns look good to me:
With little more than two weeks gone since the elections that gave his party a majority in both houses, Mr. Leahy has already begun pressing the Justice Department for greater openness. In a letter last Friday, he asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to release two documents whose existence the Central Intelligence Agency, in response to a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union, recently acknowledged for the first time. Although their details are not known, the documents appear to have provided a legal basis for the agency’s detention and harsh interrogation of high-level terrorism suspects.One document is a directive, signed by President Bush shortly after the September 2001 attacks, that granted the C.I.A. authority to set up detention centers outside the United States and outlined allowable interrogation procedures.
Obviously, though, the administration's not going to go quietly. There are going to need to be subpoenas, and lawsuits and all sorts of mess. Not only is this administration "obsessed with secrecy" but these kind of inquiries aren't leading to, say, possibly embarrassing revelations about the White House travel office, they're leading to serious war crimes, major violations of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, and what you can only call a large-scale aversion to following the all. Torture, surveillance, detentions, it's all in the Judiciary Committee's jurisdiction.
Casino Royale
Hey, good job reviving your franchise! I kept reading that this was a "grittier" James Bond, but I didn't really see that. They gave us a more human scale Bond than recent films had offered and, most importantly of all, made it genuinely sexy instead of all fake-sexy. They also kept up a reasonably coherent story where you were actually interested to see what happened. That said, the central poker game narrative didn't really make sense to me.
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Heads in the Sand
