I've mostly moved to open source software -- Firefox, Vienna, Adium, NeoOffice, etc. The big exception is iTunes where Apple has me neatly locked into their software since I'm locked into their iPod. The other exception is that I use Apple's proprietary Mail program since it's always seemed fine. Is there any good reason to switch away from it and start using Thunderbird instead? Or, conversely, is there any good reason to avoid Thunderbird?
Oftentimes, I'm not exactly sure what it is Apple has invested in the proprietary software they bundle with their computers. Why bother with not charging for Safari when they could just not charge for Firefox? iTunes, I understand, is part-and-parcel of the iTunes Store revenue stream . . . but most of the rest seems pointless.
In his LA Timescolumn Jonah Goldberg concedes that Wesley Clark and I are not, in fact, anti-semites. Nevertheless, I think he think it's still okay for people to insinuate that we are anti-semites since he thinks Larry Summers didn't get a fair shake from feminists during an unrelated controversy.
I'd also be curious to know: Does Jonah think we should launch a war with Iran? To me, his rhetorical approach to this issue suggests that he does, but I don't want to make any leaps of logic or impute policy positions to him.
If I may say so, I think the conventional formulation about "cutting off" funding for the war in Iraq is a little misleading. The embedded presumption seems to be that there is a continuing and infinite stream of war funding that continues to flow until either the president removes the troops or else the congress cuts the stream. The federal government does not, however, actually operate in this manner. Rather, appropriations are made providing finite quantities of funds for specific purposes, sometimes with the purpose including an intention to delegate some discretion to the executive branch.
There are some ins and outs, but the point is this the default path is for the government to run out of money. Absent additional appropriations by the congress, the war money will simply be spent and none will be left. Nobody needs to "cut the funding" -- all that happens, in legal/budgetary terms, is that no additional money is appropriated. In practice, obviously, it's not going to come to that -- even during the 1995 "government shutdown" they made sure military forces deployed abroad had money. The point, though, is that this is where the budgetary rubber hits the policy road. Bush has a policy he wants to implement. Sooner or later, he needs to come to congress asking for money. What you're going to want to see is a resolution that says, "of course we'll appropriate money for the war -- here's $X billion to pay for a withdrawal plan scheduled to end by Date Y after which no more of this money will be spent." Bush is going to want to argue that he should veto this bill and that anything other than an unadorned appropriation of money to be spent as he sees fits constitutes an abandonment of our troops in the field. Liberals are going to want to argue the reverse -- that failure to sign the appropriation with the withdrawal proviso constitutes abandonment of the troops in the field.
Also worth a read are Max Boot's neoimperial dreams. Before you read his column, though, read Kevin Carey on the link between school funding and education reform. His argument is that legislators (voters, etc.) will be willing to pony up more money for schools, but only if they're assured in advance that it's not just "more money for the same thing." That all sounds like how a reasonable world would work. Now turn back to Boot. Notice that he's calling for the expenditure of hundreds of billions of additional dollars in order to do, yes, the same thing. And notice how eerily plausible it is that he'll actually get his way.
Arnold Kling doesn't write much about foreign policy, but his ideological manifesto nicely lays out one of the presuppositions behind frequent Munich-invocations in the American political debate:
10. When foreign leaders issue threats against us, we take them at their word and act accordingly.
The only problem with this principle is that it's totally nuts. For one thing, is there a reason we take threats at face value but not other kinds of statements? Presumably we don't, as a rule, take all statements made by foreign leaders at face value. We don't do this for the same reason we don't, as a rule, take all statements made by people in general at face value: Sometimes it serves people's interests to lie. If it sometimes serves people's interests to lie, this applies to foreign leaders as well. It applies to both the threats and the non-threats of foreign leaders. You should always, obviously, take into account what people are saying to you. In general, however, and especially in international politics, it rarely makes sense to evaluate statements at face value.
To take an example, when George W. Bush promised to "end tyranny" as a general phenomenon around the word, should the People's Republic of China took his threat to overthrow their government at face value? Launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike? Of course not. That would be stupid. People say things for all kinds of reasons -- responses need to be tailored to the actual situation, not to remarks others utter. What's more, think how easily foreign leaders could push us around if they knew all threats would be responded to as if they were 100 percent credible.
I liked Brad DeLong's take on inequality a lot. Brad Plumer's essay on rich people controlling the political system is also very good. It's worth tying the two together as well. Sometimes, for example, you get something like the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in which a relatively small number of people (the executives of large media companies, the owners of large media companies, and a handful of superstar content creators) who were all far wealthier on average than the typical American used their wealth to get congress to effectuate a significant transfer of wealth away from the vast majority of citizens and toward them.
You rarely see such direct examples of rich people using political clout to simply confiscate wealth and further enrich themselves, but it's hardly unheard of either. I recommend Dean Baker's book, The Conservative Nanny State. On a micro-scale ask yourself why it is that in Washington, DC (and as best I can tell pretty much all major American cities) that city services are delivered better and faster to the neighborhoods where rich people live, further increasing the value of the property they already own.
So...watching Diane Feinstein question DNI-designate Mike McConnell it turns out that the new Director of National Intelligence . . . hasn't read the forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Nothing like the sweet, sweet professionalism of the Bush administration.
From where I sit, the real significance of this story about Jacques Chirac going off-message on Iran is to underscore something I've said before -- it's not clear that bombing Iran would delay Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon at all. Virtually every country on earth could be doing less than it currently is to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. As we see in Chirac's remarks, in virtually all of these countries there is some substantial disagreement as to how big of a deal the Iranian nuclear program is. Beyond the strict merits of the question, there are two factors militating toward a hard line on Iran. One is that the United States wants other countries to take a hard line, and our words carry some weight. A second is that other countries don't want the United States or Israel to do anything crazy and start a war.
If a war starts, obviously, that second rationale goes out the window. For some countries, the first may go out the window as well. At the margin, countries with aspirations to greatness (Russia, China, France, India, Brazil, etc.) all face a constant dilemma between kissing the hegemon's ass and wanting the undermine the hegemon. The more we act like a rogue hegemon -- launching or supporting aggressive warfare against other countries -- the more at least some of those of those countries will opt for less ass-kissing and more undermining. Both considerations indicate that military strikes on Iran are likely to erode other countries' efforts to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb.
It's crucial not to sell those efforts short. Russia and China have taken a beating in the American press -- especially the hawkish press -- for not cooperating with the Bush administration as much as one might like. And, indeed, one could ask them to do more. On the other hand, they could be doing much less. At the limit, China could simply accept a whole bunch of money in exchange for sending some Chinese nuke-building guys and nuke-building machines over to Iran: Bomb! I'm not a fortune-teller, so I can't tell you how big the impact of strikes would be on foreign countries' attitudes, but the point is simply that it's a huge X Factor that hawks are absolutely refusing to reckon with.
Clearly, if you know my views on Iraq you'll guess I'm not super thrilled about the wording of the Warner Resolution on Iraq. Certainly, I'm sympathetic to what Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold are saying about it. Triple certainly, I was a fan of the Kerry-Feingold resolution back in the day, and were I in a position to influence actual White House policy, what I'd be doing is moving as swiftly as logistically feasible to the removal of American troops from Iraq. That said, I tend to agree with Ed Kilgore that it would be a mistake to jab the knives in the back of this resolution. At the moment, absolutely anything that congress says or does about Iraq is pure kabuki. In kabuki terms, this resolution counts as a repudiation of Bush by Democrats and many Republicans. As policy, from what I can tell this resolution is not-so-wonderful. As kabuki, though, it's good kabuki.
Even if you disagree with that, what I'd urge everyone to do is keep their eyes on the real ball in the air at the moment: Iran. If Bush really bombs Iran and spineless Democrats back himex post facto then the whole Iraq dynamic changes dramatically, and not for the better. If you want to hassle your member of congress on behalf of some peacenik cause this month, hassle him or her about Iran. The time to hassle your congressional leaders about Iraq will come, as I keep saying, when Bush needs to come ask congress for more money. Hold the line on Iran and hold the line on the supplemental request, and everything will be okay as it possibly can be. If, by contrast, Democrats bobble the Iran issue, then all the strongly-worded Chris Dodd bills in the world aren't going to save us.
Via Sacha Zimmerman at TNR, take a look at Government Exhibit 702 in the Scooter Libby case. The overwhelming majority of the documented has been redacted, but I've reproduced the relevant portion of the page below:
As you can see, someone has handwritten something about "Tom Cruise & Penelope Cruz at his office." And something's redacted! Has the government really classified something about Cruise & Cruz? What is it? Where are the leaks when we need them?
I'm totally non-outraged by the coaches selections, though obviously this Shaq business is absurd. You need to play in actual games to be having an All-Star quality year. But how come that ESPN.com writeup doesn't list anyone as a backup center? I know nobody likes to admit to being a center these days, but Dwight Howard and Amare Stoudemire, at a minimum, play that position.
That's a bang-up job by the intelligence community and the Washington Post alike. The declassified version of the report should be available to us peons here very soon.
Ezra makes very good points here, though I think one should be a little more careful with language. I don't want Democratic leaders to just become generically "anti-war" (whatever that might mean) any more than I want them to merely draw a narrow lesson like "don't invade countries whose names include a "q" on odd numbered years." One needs to really think about what the right way to deal with the world is. A couple of days ago, Francis Fukuyama had a quick statement of a few key morals of the story:
American military doctrine has emphasised the use of overwhelming force, applied suddenly and decisively, to defeat the enemy. But in a world where insurgents and militias deploy invisibly among civilian populations, overwhelming force is almost always counterproductive: it alienates precisely those people who have to make a break with the hardcore fighters and deny them the ability to operate freely. The kind of counterinsurgency campaign needed to defeat transnational militias and terrorists puts political goals ahead of military ones, and emphasises hearts and minds over shock and awe.
A second lesson that should have been drawn from the past five years is that preventive war cannot be the basis of a long-term US nonproliferation strategy. The Bush doctrine sought to use preventive war against Iraq as a means of raising the perceived cost to would-be proliferators of approaching the nuclear threshold. Unfortunately, the cost to the US itself was so high that it taught exactly the opposite lesson: the deterrent effect of American conventional power is low, and the likelihood of preventive war actually decreases if a country manages to cross that threshold.
I'm not sure why it should be so hard for political leaders to articulate a couple of points along these lines with regard to the Iran issue.
. . . to become an economics commentator for National Review Online? Apparently, a sketchy command of the subject matter. Larry Kudlow offers a "footnote to today's strong jobs support". Excellent. In particular, he promises "some new factoids to sink your teeth into concerning all the nonsense about wage inequality — a subject that the brilliant Washington economist Alan Reynolds has debunked voluminously." Ah, yes, that Alan Reynolds. Also note that one can hardly debunk a subject. Nor is Reynolds' paper especially voluminous. Even better, though, the factoids Kudlow presents are . . . irrelevant to the question of wage inequality. He writes:
At $16.76, average hourly earnings are nearly 20 percent above year 2000 levels, and 44 percent above the $11.65 level in the fifth year of the Papa Bush/Clinton business expansion cycle.This is the fifth year of the GWB cycle.
Ah, yes, the old nominal figures gambit. But wait!
Even in inflation adjusted terms, real average hourly earnings are slightly higher than the 2000 peak, and nine percent above the 1995 fifth year average level.
In short, the critics are right! Median wage growth has been anemic. Or, as Kudlow triumphantly puts it, "real average hourly earnings are slightly higher than the 2000 peak. That's very poor performance. Meanwhile, high-end incomes have increased quite a bit. That's growing inequality!
NRO needs a higher caliber of hack. Alan Reynolds at least knows what he's trying to "prove."
Obviously, we already know that some of his remarks to other audiences have had a somewhat different tone, but when Ezra Klein asked John Edwards about Iran, the former senator gave a good answer. Edwards also recommended this recent Thomas Friedman column which I have to agree is pretty good.
Off topic, let me also note that I don't quite understand why the Grizzlies are trying to trade Pau Gasol; normally it seems to me that you only want to trade your team's best player if he's old and past -- or nearly past -- his peak performance level. Gasol's only 26, not worrying about hairline like Joe Biden, and he still seems to be improving.
All that said, the reason I'm trying to maintain a positive demeanor is that it turned out this morning that I needed to . . . delete my entire hard drive and do a clean installation of the system software. Fortunately, almost all of my files were backed up, but I did lose a significant chunk of a draft of one chapter of the book. It did, however, present an opportunity to further re-think my software commitments. Thus, I've downloaded Camino and have been using it this afternoon. It's pretty good. People in love with their Firefox plugins will probably be disappointed by the relative paucity of similar offerings for Camino, but I never really used much of that stuff.
Apparently, there's a movie coming to a theater near me soon all about Ralph Nader. Like most Gore 2000 voters, I bear no small level of bitterness toward Nader and those who supported him or voted for him. Certainly, I think the events of the past six years have amply demonstrated that there both is a dime's worth of difference between the two major political parties and that a dime can buy you an awful lot.
On the other hand, one of the memes floating about in the Nadersphere has, I think, been vindicated: Namely the basically Leninist idea that a Democratic loss and a period of Republican governance would pull the Democrats in a more progressive direction in terms of, for example, questioning "Washington Consensus" globalization. At the time, that argument didn't make sense to me. And in some important ways I still don't think it makes a ton of sense logically. But it does seem to be what's happened. Now, was that a price worth paying for the dead in Iraq, the torture, etc.? I don't really think so.
Tyler Cowen and Michael Brandl write a bit about high textbook prices. At the end of the day, it seems to me that in both the higher and lower education contexts, the case for open source textbooks is strong. Read a bit here about the California Open Source Textbook Project, which has a K-12 focus. The same logic, however, applies most everywhere. In the college context, obviously, some books are going to be so specialized that I'm not sure this would work. But for anything used in grade school, and any of your big, generic college subjects you should be able to do it.
You see below the projections of global warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-sponsored scientific organization dedicated to looking at such matters. Reason's Ronald Bailey writes that "Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now."
But not everyone agrees. The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, for example, will give you $10,000 if you produce essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs" since in their view, the IPCC is "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work." Coincidentally enough, AEI happens to receive large doses of funding from the energy industry. The real question is why media outlets continue to treat the output of people who work at AEI as some kind of near-substitute for actual scholarship.
What Glenn Greenwald said. And also what Ezra Klein said. Let me note, however, that there's a kind of dual madness to the binational US-Israeli axis of hawkishness on Iran. On the one hand, we're pretty clearly being enjoined to either launch a war with Iran largely on behalf of Israeli security or else to support an Israeli initiation of war which, clearly, would be undertaken with Israeli security in mind. This is because the Iranian nuclear program is (rightly) seen as problematic for the United States, but fundamentally more problematic for Israel which has to live in the neighborhood.
The trouble, obviously, is that this isn't actually a good way to deal with Iran's nuclear program. What's more, as M.J. Rosenberg points out the view that the Iranian nuclear program is, from the Iranian point of view, all about Israel is just mistaken. "In fact, it is primarily about the United States." Iran, after all, would be crazy to spend more time thinking about Israel, its small high-quality military with limited power-projection capabilities, and its medium-sized nuclear arsenal than it does thinking about Israel's giant far-off ally that's constantly invading neighboring countries, has a huge military, and an enormous nuclear arsenal. As Rosenberg writes "That is why many believe that negotiations would be productive. In negotiations with the United States, Iran can demand recognition and security guarantees from Washington while we can demand an end to nuclear bomb development, an end to their meddling in Iraq, an end to support of Hezbollah and endorsement of negotiations as a means to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
In short, American unwillingness to negotiate is seriously compromising Israeli security. It's only once this is taken as a given that the United States is suddently expected to act militarily on Israel's behalf when timely diplomacy could have achieved a better result at lower cost. My suspicion continues to be that "pro-Israel" outfits and their funders on some level want the Middle East to be perpetually unstable and Israel to be perpetually at risk. Hawkish American Jews, after all, pay few if any of the costs of such a dynamic. In the meantime, it gives some meaning to their hobbyist's enthusiasm for advocacy on behalf of Israel.
So . . . I had all my MP3's backed up before the recent unpleasantness with erasing my hard drive. Good for me. I realize, however, that I didn't back up any of my iTunes playlists. Meaning I now need to recreate them. Which turns out to be a pretty daunting task when you have 6,000+ hours of music on file. So keep that in mind . . . back the playlists up, too!
I've already mentioned New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz's lunatic screed against George Soros wherein the philanthropist and Holocaust survivor is made to answer to charges of being a Nazi collaborator. To me, it seemed the less said about this the better. But Steve Clemons wanted to say more, so I say give him a read. Soros, of course, earned his money, whereas Peretz obtained it through marriage. And Soros has spent his money on various charitable endeavors around the world. Peretz has used his cash to secure publication for his otherwise unpublishable work and, as Clemens says, is so deeply opposed to the notion of political accountability for the architechts of the present disaster because such accountability would necessarily bite him.
The trouble with government work, as opposed to the private sector is that there's a lack of efficiency. It's important to understand, however, that there's nothing intrinsically efficient about private sector work. No magical "it's the free market" dust comes and renders private enterprises effective. Rather, the idea is simply that an inefficiently run private enterprise (and there are many) would simply go out of business. An inefficiently run government office, by contrast, goes out of business when it loses political support and sees its budget grow as long as it maintains political support. Thus, you see public sector dollars flowing to whatever there's a strong political constituency for, whereas private sector dollars flow to wherever well-managed firms are meeting demand.
Then enter government contractors which, as The New York Times points out, have exploded to unprecedented levels under George W. Bush and the late unlamented Republican congress. Here you have private enterprises displacing government. Why? For the private sector efficiency, of course! But you don't actually get that efficiency. It's still a government program. Funding is still being determined by political support. The cash doesn't go to companies that can do a really good job, it just goes to companies that have political clout -- i.e. ones that recycle a share of their profits into campaign contributions. It's essentially the worst of both worlds, since you get the inherent problems of the public sector plus the need for owners to be taking a slice off the top in profit margins. It is, however, a very good deal for politicians interested in union-busting and for politicians interested in raking money in from government contractors. Shockingly, the GOP loves it.
Like a cruel joke, it was just a couple of days before Antawn Jamison got hurt that I read John Hollinger arguing that the Wizards were unlikely to stay on top of the East because they had no ability to survive an injury. And how true it is. The Hayes/Songaila duo that tried to replace Jamison went a collective 3-12 from the field while failing to get to the line and grabbing just five boards in a combined 36 minutes at power forward. In particular, Hayes kept getting the ball for open jumpers that he would miss, followed by me muttering "Jamisonw would have hit that." Obviously, Gilbert launching 15 (!) three pointers and only hitting three doesn't help.
Photo by Matthew Yglesias
Unrelatedly, far be it from me to tell Phil Jackson how to coach a basketball team, but if the Lakers were healthy and I were (as tends to happen today's NBA) facing a lineup that didn't have a proper inside scoring threat, I would try to play Bryant-Walton-Odom-Radmanovich-Cook . . . with all those sharp-shooting tweeners you'd be an overall decent rebounding team and could spread the floor super-wide for Kobe.
Part of the Democrats' problem has been cultural. Still notionally tied to the 20th century glory days of strong urban working class and ethnic voting blocs, some Democratic activists have trouble imagining themselves as the car-pool and mega-mall party. Educated elites in the core cities, university towns, and inner suburbs often reject the exurban lifestyle -- big yards, big cars, big churches, big families -- and thus refuse to embrace a politics based on their concerns. "I wouldn't be caught dead in the suburbs," one 20- something urban liberal told me recently in Washington's leading political bookstore.
Seriously? That's the evidence? One twentysomething liberal in Kramerbooks or Politics & Prose told him that he wouldn't be caught dead in the suburbs and this is the source of the Democratic Party's political woes? Obviously, though, the suburban lifestyle isn't supposed to appeal to single young professionals. If the Democratic Party's electoral fortunes genuinely hinge on convincing twentysomething activists that they find suburban living personally appealing then the party is fucked. But maybe if Range thought about this for ten minutes he'd see that his account doesn't make sense. It's just that he's writing in Blueprint so he needs to find a way to take a random personal swipe at liberals.
There's been a slightly weird "speaking truth to non-power" moment recently in the blogosphere where MYDD's Chris Bowers has been joining Team HRC in trying to convince us all that Hillary Clinton has a daunting advantage in the upcoming primary race. I'm not buying it and neither is Jonathan Chait who notes correctly that her polling isn't nearly as good in the early primary states as it is in big, vague national polls:
In a memo published the day she announced her candidacy, Clinton pollster Mark Penn offered up a rebuttal to this inconvenient fact. Clinton, he argued, is bound to rise in the early primary states as she spends more time there. But other candidates will be spending more time in Iowa and New Hampshire, too. The question is: Which candidate is more likely to benefit from endless hours of speechifying, hand-shaking, and town hall meetings? There's no reason to think the answer will be Clinton. While she may be just as smart as--and more experienced than--Edwards and Obama, she is an average orator, while Edwards is a very good one and Obama is a brilliant one. Having seen all three give speeches, it's hard for me to imagine how a prolonged side-by-side comparison will move voters into Clinton's camp. And, as the best-known of the leading candidates, she'll have the hardest time making a strong new impression anyway.
This seems right to me. Something Chait doesn't mention, is that I think she's particularly vulnerable because she's counting on a perception of inevitability to boost her to victory. Insofar as leaders of progressive institutions believe she's likely to win, they're unlikely to point out that she's a poor choice. There's no point in opposing someone who's certain to win. But as cracks in the armor appear more evident, I think there's a good chance of a downward spiral as more opinion leaders speak out.
One thing hanging over Barack Obama is the idea -- voiced by Debra Dickerson among others -- that he isn't really black. He was, after all, raised by his white mother. And his dad was from Kenya, not the descendant of American slaves. It seems to me that Joe Biden should have dispelled that kind of talk, by showing that Obama's black enough to be subjected to bizarre race-related crap from white people.
Similarly, if you watch the NBA I think it's clear that there's a set of stereotypes associated with black players ("amazing speed and athleticism") and a different set associated with Europeans ("incredible skills, but he's too soft") and also fairly clear that black Europeans (Parker, Diaw, Turiaf, etc.) are treated like blacks rather than like Europeans for these purposes.
UPDATE: See also Chris Hayes' article on David Alexrod.
The feeling around the house is that the people with tickets to the Super Bowl have it too easy. The game should be held outdoors in the most unpleasant weather possible. That way, celebrities and corporate fat cats won't want to attend and hardcore fans will have the chance to live their dreams of shrivering. Based on my brief research, Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta seems to be the ideal candidate. Other suggestions?
If you read blogs, you almost certainly know about Chris Mooney, one of the world's distinguished Prospect alumns and author of The Republican War on Science. It's also likely that you've heard of Alan Sokal, perpetrator of the infamous Social Text scam, exposing the ignorant anti-science posturing of some post-modern humanities scholarship. Obviously, they're people with some similar concerns, but also very different targets.
It's noteworthy, then, to see them publish an op-ed together in The Los Angeles Times that more-or-less just takes up the (correct, not coincidentally) Mooney point of view that the politically powerful conservative movement is the real problem here.
Lots of folks have been rightly indignant that Bill Kristol apparently believes the latest carnage in Iraq demonstrates that the insurgents are getting "worried." One might only note that this line of thought goes all the way back to the August 2003 bombing that killed Sergio Vieira di Mello and proved to sensible people that the Iraq operation was, in fact, going much, much, much less well than the Bush administration would like you to believe. You can see David Adesnik's extensive defense of the proposition that these early outbreaks of violence were signs of imminent American success (see also here). For the other perspective on whether massive violence in Iraq was actually a good thing, you can see Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum. I think it's fairly clear which side the verdict of history came down on.
Kristol, in short, is trying to ply his audience with stale bread here.
Dave Noon catches what might be considered some more novel rhetoric in that same Kristol clip where he suggests that the people responsible for this massive bombing attack that killed well over 100 people were "try[ing] to convey an impression of chaos." This is, perhaps, the insurgent side of Green Lantern geopolitics. Great powers like the United States achieve our objectives through "unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will" whereas assymetrical adversaries will try to convey an impression of chaos.
This is, obviously, appealing not only to members of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, but also to their elders and betters on Fox News. If the problem is chaos, then it's a problem that's either unsolvable, or else has to be solved by soldiers doing work on the ground. But if the problem is merely an impression of chaos then the work of our soldiers and Marines is secondary. The real battle is fought on the airwaves, on the op-ed pages, and in the blogs. Who has the courage to stand and stifle this impression of chaos? To replace it with an impression of order? A daunting challenge, to be sure, but Bill Kristol is ready for it.
Okay, this seems a little too petty to post on, but since there's now a MYDD Facebook group and a TPM Fans Facebook group it seems worth pointing out that back in summer 2006 or so somebody created a "Matthew Yglesias is Kinda Awesome" Facebook group. I bring this up because every now and again I get Facebook requests from people I don't know who, I assume, are readers. There's been a big uptick in this over the past few days which I'm guessing is related to the MYDD and TPM groups.
At any rate, in the nicest possible way I'd sort of rather keep my page oriented toward brick and mortal IRL friends. If you only know me and the other commenters on this site through the blog, I'd recommend the group. In other news, is it possible that Jackson Diehl is being unfair to Bush here and congressional Democrats are just engaged in a little posturing?
As Kevin Drum reminded us with regard to John Edwards, any politician worth his salt should be able to tailor his message to his audience. Certainly that's the case with Jonathan Singer's interview with DSCC Chair Chuck Schumer, at least judging by his ability to absolutely lavish praise on bloggers and the netroots. That said, you've got to go by what you have to go by, and saying good things to liberal audiences is better than saying bad things to liberal audiences. And I found Schumer's words on Iran encouraging.:
Iran was never discussed, and I could not imagine - maybe there are one or two Democrats in the Senate who believe the AUMF authorizes the President to go into Iran. Should he try to go into Iran without an AUMF will do everything we can to try to stop that. . .
I have always believed in foreign policy, particularly when your nation was attacked - not only my nation but my city was attacked - you tend to give the chief executive the benefit of the doubt to defend us. That doesn't mean a carte blanche. But you never give someone who has been so bad the second benefit of the doubt. I think anything the President asks for with Iran is going to be received with extreme dubiousness, certainly by me, by the Democratic Senate and by the American people. I mean he says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iran, people are going to think twice before believing it. If he says this is an immediate danger to the US, people are going to think twice before believing it. If he says military force is the only way to deal with this problem, people are going to thing 20 times before believing it.
I could imagine better words to offer on this subject, but that's pretty good, and it's significant because Schumer's really something of a bellweather hawk, the kind of guy who backed the Iraq War but doesn't have any deep, Lieberman-esque intellectual commitment to warmongering or a political strategy in which hawkishness plays a key role.
Via GFR, a Peter Beinart column that, while full of interesting notions, doesn't make sense to me. The main point is that as the public becomes more interested in international cooperation and less interested in military conflict, voters become more open to woman candidates and this is helpful to Hillary Clinton:
Not coincidentally, the percentage of Americans who say they will vote for a female presidential candidate has returned to roughly 90 percent. And the approval ratings for John McCain -- the contender most associated with an aggressive, ultra-tough foreign policy -- have crashed. A February 2006 poll found that, when asked whether a man or a woman would do a better job as commander-in-chief, respondents were evenly split. And, when asked who would do a better job on foreign policy, the hypothetical female candidate led by eight points. It stands to reason. If voters who oppose the Iraq war remain more likely to support female candidates, as they were several years ago, that's good news for Clinton, because there are a lot more of them now.
But this has nothing in particular to do with Clinton. Presumably, any non-Lieberman Democrat will be helped vis-à-vis John McCain insofar as the public grows more skeptical about the use of military force. The more important bit of research Beinart sites comes in the next paragraph where he observes that "Research shows that female candidates--especially Democratic ones--are perceived as more liberal than they really are." This quickly gets turned around into a clever pro-HRC point ("She may find it easier to run as an antiwar candidate because that is how people are predisposed to see her. Ever since she entered the U.S. Senate, Clinton has been trying to overcome people's ingrained perceptions. Now she must hope she hasn't succeeded too well.") but I think it's obviously a huge problem for her candidacy.
Who wants to nominate a candidate who's going to be perceived as more liberal than she really is? Who benefits from that, exactly? Well, it's a good combination from the point of view of Al From, but I think from other points of view it's pretty clearly a raw deal. You want a candidate who broadens the appeal of progressive politics (perhaps Petey has a recommendation), not a candidate whose a useful mechanism for selling a not-so-progressive message to the base voters in the primary.
Via Alex Tabarrok it looks like Utah may get a fairly comprehensive statewide voucher program. I won't pretend to note the state of educational play in Utah in any detail, but my strong suspicion is that this is very, very unlikely to lead to any noteworthy improvements in student achievement. It's a low population density state where the prospects for meaningful educational competition are not so hot. But more to the point, Utah features a very, very high proportion of the population belonging to a single hierarchical religion.
It seems to me that given a sufficiently generous voucher program (as Tabarrok notes, this one isn't quite there) education in Utah will evolve toward a system where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the de facto education provider throughout the bulk of the state, the LDS church gets a lot of taxpayer money, and people living in Salt Lake City and maybe a couple of other towns may have some secular alternative options available to them.
I think there's probably a simple answer to Kevin Drum's question about why Republican members of congress have become even more skeptical that global warming is due to human activity -- when the GOP lost big in November, the losers came disproportionately from less-conservative districts which means the losers were disproportionately moderate in their views. This is one of several rather perverse consequences of our rather unfortunate constitutional system.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no apologist for "moderate" Republicans, but it's still the case that there is and was some difference between even the fauxist of faux-moderates and the true right wing hard core. It's the hard core the voters were trying to reject. But, in practice, it's almost impossible to knock the true believers out of their safe seats unless they get into ethical hot water on the side. So instead you go after the more vulnerable, more moderate members for failing to moderate the GOP agenda in any meaningful way. And fair enough -- don't cry for them. But the upshot is still that most of the worst of the worst get to hang around.
Tyler Cowen dubsDr. Neruda's Cure for Evil by Rafael Yglesias "The Best Novel By A Father of A Major Blogger," and also notes his mother's novels. Under the circumstances, I can hardly let the fiction and non-fiction books of my grandfather, José Yglesias, go unmentioned. Particularly noteworthy from a blog-centric point of view is Tristan and the Hispanics whose title character is a fictionalized version of the major blogger in question.
One of the many scandals of the Iraq War has been the way in which its real budgetary cost has been obscured from the American people. Not only were we told boldfaced lies before the invasion, but ever since the invasion happened the White House has for years not only refused to budget for the war in advance, but requested supplemental appropriations that clearly weren't covering the actual cost. In particular, we've seen a lot of what you might call war-related capital depreciation as military equipment breaks at a much higher rate during an intense operation. Nevertheless, through almost four years of combat this was never really accounted for. And now the bill's coming due in the 2008 Pentagon budget request.
At this point, obviously, one can hardly avoid spending the money. The equipment has already been damaged, so it may as well get repaired. We're not, however, talking about a small sum of money. This is $37.6 billion, and had this slice of expense been counted up front you would have seen less support at the margin for incurring it in the first place. The other giant source of hidden cost -- which has remained hidden thus far -- is the expense of long-term care for all the wounded soldiers.
I've been accused of having a monomaniacal obsession with New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz which is comparable to Peretz's own monomanias. Readers can make of that what they will. For my part, it just seems important that the words of the owner and editor of a major American political magazine achieve the wide distribution they deserve. In this offering, for example, Peretz explains that Palestinians, like Iraqis, are subhuman:
This is cold comfort to the Israelis. Their enemies can still maim and kill. It is entirely preferable for the Palestinians to have their rump and run it as they will or can. But, please, enough about how civilized they are. They are on their way to being Iraqis.
Taking the "neo" out of "neo-imperialist" mindset. How sweet it is.
Early in the season, I made a habit of loudly shouting "Blatche!" during the fourth quarter of games when the Wizards had a substantial lead, hoping to transform the prospect into a fan favorite victory cigar. Now that Antawn Jamison's hurt, though, Eddie Jordan is seeing fit to give him some meaningful minutes (17 each against Toronto, LA, and Seattle) and he's actually showing some promise instead of merely being "promising." He still can't play defense at all, however. Watching the Wizards over the past few season, I'd become more familiar than my 90s-Knicks-raised self would have thought possible with sub-par defensive performances, but Blatche is truly out of this world. He's regularly out of place, seems to have trouble remembering which player he's supposed to guard even during leisurely transitions, and he fouls constantly.
Speaking of young big men, ESPN The Magazine's "NEXT" feature always puzzles me, but simply proclaiming Dwight Howard big man of the future strikes me as odd. What about Greg Oden? What about Andrew Bynum? Maybe Howard will be better than those guys at the end of the day, or maybe he won't be, but it certainly doesn't look like a sure thing in Howard's favor, does it? The NBA may just be returning to the olden days when you could have more than one great center in the league at the same time.
I know there was a lot of blogospheric skepticism about the merits of passing a non-binding resolution against the surge, but people should consider that the GOP sure does seem determined to stop such a resolution from passing. Maybe the Democratic leadership knows what it's doing?
I'm not sure if there's any point in posting this, since I think Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign is a clear non-starter, but here's a staggering transparent attempt to have it three or four different ways on abortion:
HANNITY: .... Let's talk about the controversial issues. You will be asked about them. Where does Rudy Giuliaini stand on abortion? And do you think roe v. wade is a good law or bad law.
GIULANI: I oppose it. I don't like it. I hate it. I think abortion is something that is a personal matter I would advise something against. However, I believe in a woman's right to choose. I think you have to ultimately not put a woman in jail for that. I think ultimately you have to leave that to a disagreement of conscience and have to respect the choice that somebody makes. So what I do say to conservatives because then you want to look at well okay what can we look to that is similar to the way you think. I think the appointment of judges that I would make would be very similar to if not exactly the same as the last two judges that were appointed. Chief Justice Roberts is somebody I work with, somebody I admire. Justice Alito, someone I knew when he was US attorney, also admire. If I had been president over the last four years, I can't think of any— that I'd do anything different with that. I guess the key is and I appointed over 100 judges when I was the mayor so it's something I take very, very seriously. I would appoint judges that interpreted the constitution rather than invented it. Understood the difference of being a judge and a legislator. And having argued a case before the Supreme Court, having argued in many, many courts is something I would take very seriously.
I think I like the Mitt Romney's more forthright flip-flop better than this, which has just left me confused. I
[T]here will be particular problems with any health care proposal. They all have vulnerabilities, they all create situations in which people might have to accept change or might get less than they currently have. And the people who are most likely to vote based on health care are also people likely to be fearful of losing what they have. It will always be for political opponents to push that fear button.
I've argued in the past that it's good to campaign on a specific plan because if you do lay one out and do leave yourself exposed to the vulnerabilities Mark highlights and win anyway, then you're in a strong position as president to get your plan passed. Conversely, if you stand for election on vague promises and then try to get something passed, you'll have a big problem. As Kevin Drum says, "you'll get the feel-good vote during the election but then lose later on when you try to fulfill your campaign promise and run smack into....the fear button." The more I think about it, though, the more I think both perspectives on this are correct.
Which is part of why I came to the conclusion I reach in this column. I don't think it's smart for candidates to either run on specific universal healht care plans or to run on a promise to devise a specific universal health care plan once in office. Rather, what I'd like to see is a candidate who says that Medicare For All is the right idea, who concedes that Medicare For All probably won't be passing congress in 2009, and therefore promises to bring Medicare for As Many As Possible:
First, change the 2003 Medicare reform bill to give the government meaningful price leverage over the pharmaceutical companies and eliminate the role for private insurance companies. Beyond that, see what you can get -- Robert Kuttner laid out a few options yesterday. Propose that Medicaid cover everyone under 25. If you can't get that, take everyone under 21. If you can't get that, take everyone under 18. If you can get that, propose adding full-time students under 25. Then all full-time students. Then everyone under 25. Lower the threshold for Medicare to 50. Or to 55. Or to 60. Lower it to 64 if that's all you can get. Then come back next year and propose lowering it to 50. Or to 55. Or to 63. Keep coming back. Let people under the threshold "buy in" to Medicare on some terms.
To my way of thinking, this kind of approach (call it "flexible intransigence") is the best way of getting things done in the context of an American political system that makes large-scale change intrinsically difficult. And I think that when you look at successful partisan positioning on domestic policy, this is the sort of thing you see. When Democrats run and win on minimum wage hikes, they don't run and win on minimum wage plans they're running and winning on the general idea that the Democratic Party is committed to making the minimum wage higher. Similarly, the GOP will make taxes lower. Democrats, similarly, should be committed to "Medicare for more!" People like Medicare.
The New York Timestakes a look at the Jews of Cuba. I myself am both Jewish and Cuban, but that's a mixed-ancestry thing, not a Jewish Cuban thing as seen in the article.
Allright, now I'm puzzled. Some kind of advisory committee of right-wing preachers has pronounced Ted Haggard "completely heterosexual." Fair enough, he's straight. He just sometimes likes to visit with gay prostitutes. Happens to the straightest of us. And, sure, meth was involved. But what heterosexual dude hasn't toked up on crystal and fucked a male hooker? Don't lie.
But here's the question. These are the same people who think gayness is curable, right? So what does the heterosexual/homosexual distinction amount to in that worldview? I thought the point was that there's no such thing as a gay person.
Hillary Clinton's doing somewhat better than I would have expected in this New Hampshire poll but the real shocker is Chris Dodd's absolutely miserable 22-20 favorable-unfavorable split. Several people in the poll have higher unfavorable ratings, but they're all much more famous than Dodd who's unknown to most respondents. How is that everyone's gotten such a negative view of Connecticut's other Senator? I think the idea of him running for president is pretty bizarre, but I can't imagine working myself into a frenzy of Dodd-hatred.
A John Nichols article in The Nation is teased on the home page thusly:
Is the Bush Administration's deliberate inaction and delusional denial of global warming an impeachable offense? John Nichols reports on the Green Party's efforts to call the President to account.
The answer is no, it is not.
Indeed, this is part of the problem with impeachment as it's set up. If you could prove that Bush had taken a $5,000 bribe in order to appoint someone's son ambassador to Portugal, that would be impeachable offense even though it also wouldn't be a big deal in the scheme of things. Conversely, the Bush administration's stance on climate change is incredibly harmful, and quite corrupt in its own way, but by no means impeachable.
Why are most blacks, unless forced by dire necessity to earn their livelihood with 'the sweat of their brow', so loath to undertake any work that dirties the hands?
I think we can all take it for granted that a book promising to explore that question is unlikely to find itself on a present-day curriculum approved by the US government. Certainly, one hopes that the insights the author may bring to bear on the subject are unlikely to become the basis for public policy in the inner-city, in Subsaharan Africa, or elsewhere. As this old but still relevant Brian Whitaker article notes, however, the exact same question, asked of Arabs rather than blacks, appears in Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind which continues to be influential in some quarters of the US government and in neoconservative circles. Also, "In the Arab view of human nature, no person is supposed to be able to maintain incessant, uninterrupted control over himself . . . once aroused, Arab hostility will vent itself indiscriminately on all outsiders."
Henry Farrell pushes an analogy between Nicholas Sarkozy and Richard Nixon that he also floated during a diavlog with Mark Schmitt. A clearly analogy, in my mind, and also in that of this Jonah Goldberg reader, is between Nixon and Rudy Giuliani. Conservative affection for Giuliani seems to be grounded almost entirely in the sense that as mayor of New York City, Giuliani stuck it to liberals (which he did), rather than in a sense that anything in Giuliani's record suggests he would cope with the issues facing the federal government in an effective-yet-conservative manner.
As with Nixon on race and the southern strategy, the basic issue with Giuliani, cultural issues, and the conservative base is whether or not the base will doom what's transparently a cynical sell out as good enough. Last, but by no means least, as with Nixon important parts of Giuliani's persona seem to be driven by personal and somewhat idiosyncratic resentments rather than anything substantive. Obviously, when the name "Nixon" comes up, one's thoughts turn to Watergate and related crimes, and these parallels between the two figures don't necessarily speak to that issue.
Brad DeLong and Arnold Kling debate the new deal on The Wall Street Journal's website. Eventually, they wind up mostly debating large federal entitlement programs. At one point Brad does try to refocus by noting that Medicare and Medicaid came long after the New Deal. It's worth saying, however, that even Social Security as we understand it wasn't really created during the New Deal era. The initial program didn't cover huge swathes of the workforce, didn't include cost of living adjustments, etc. Read all about the history here and you'll see that the provisions that make Social Security controversial mostly came in the 50s and to some extent the 70s.
And yet it's this -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -- that most people are really talking about when they talk about "the New Deal." Ronald Reagan is said to have won over the Reagan Democrats by expressing warm feelings for the New Deal but hostility to the Great Society. When people say that, however, that don't mean that Reagan gave the impression that he wanted to eliminate Medicare, scale back Social Security, and preserve a large series of important-but-obscure regulations to the financial services industry. They mean that Reagan gave the impression of a sympathetic view to large universal entitlement programs combined with hostility to narrowly targeted programs aimed at the poor and identified with the black underclass. And yet, the most controversial of these programs -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- actually does trace its origins to the New Deal.
Man. Rick Perlstein sure does love blogs and this isn't the first time he's dedicated a column to the subject. So where's the Perlstein blog (or, perhaps, perlslog), damnit? RickPerlstein.org looks like it was created in 1998. They're not hard to set up.
At any rate, I'm not sure how generalizable the FireDogLake/Plame trial experience really is, but the initial point about Jay Carney blundering through recent political history and then lashing out at people who noted his errors really is revelatory.
I have all kinds of disagreements with today's Max Boot column, but there's a deeper meta-level disagreement I also have with him and with General David Petraeus, "Front Man for Bush's Iraq Plan" namely that I don't see how all this stuff about counterinsurgency is even relevant to the situation in Iraq today. To the situation in Iraq in 2003? Sure maybe. Maybe even some time into 2004. Back then you had an insurgency/counterinsurgency dynamic. You had a political entity we were wholeheartedly backing -- the Coalition Provisional Authority -- and you had insurgent groups fighting against it. Chestnuts like "Which side gives the best protection, which one threatens the most, which one is most likely to win, these are the criteria governing the population's stand" were likely applicable then.
Today, though, we're beyond all that. The dynamic in Iraq has become complicated and multi-faceted. We don't wholeheartedly support the agenda of Nouri al-Maliki's political coalition. There are competing armed groups in Iraq whose power we'd like to check. There is, as everyone knows, a condition of multi-pronged civil war and we're not eager to take sides in it. Under those circumstances, however, handbooks about beating back insurgencies aren't relevant. If we had some coherent political goals, it would be worth having a discussion about methods of achieving those goals. But we don't have them. The administration's policy is based on the idea that the Middle East is meaningfully divided between an "extremist" team (the Mahdi Army, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, UPDATE: and al-Qaeda) and a "moderate" team (Israel, Sinioria, King Hussein, the United States, Mubarrak) and that we're trying to help the moderates beat the extremists. This is just a giant, baffling, analytical error and no number of handbooks is going to change it.
Not really following college basketball, I knew that putting up good numbers in college has only a vague relationship to being a great NBA player, but just this morning I saw the actual list of college Player of the Year award winners. It's sobering:
There are some good players on this list. Elton Brand doesn't get the recognition he deserves and Marcus Camby's contribution to Denver is, I think, frequently understated. Nevertheless, it's hard to avoid noticing that of the guys on this list only Tim Duncan is a legit franchise player.
Karen Tumulty's praise of American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson naturally struck me as an intriguing strategic initiative in Swampland's ongoing struggles with left-wing blogofascism. The way I see it, Markos is the Hitler of blogofascism, Duncan the Mussolini, and the TAP gang is Franco, trying to play both sides of the blog/MSM table. So in the spirit of reciprocity, let's note that Joe Klein seems to have perfectly sound views on health care. I particularly agree with him about Medicaid -- insofar as one is going to attempt dramatic reform of the health care system, getting poor people out of the Medicaid ghetto should be a priority.
Foreign Policy magazine has an interview up with Bruce Ackerman about congressional ability to check the president's war powers. It mostly focuses on what can and cannot be done vis-a-vis Iraq (as I've been saying, it comes down to the budget requests) but also gets into Iran. Ackerman says the president can't so much as bomb Iran without congressional authorization. I'd like to believe that's true, and it seems consonant with a straightforward reading of the "declare war" clause of the constitution. That said, we all know that declaring war business has been a dead letter for some time. I also seem to recall that Bill Clinton ordered airstrikes against Serbia without congressional authorization.
If you want a sense of how we do here in the District, check this out. As part of newly elected mayor Adrian Fenty's First 100 Days initiative, we're going to get a new map of taxi zones in our cabs. The new map is going to have two important features that the old map lacked:
North will be at the top of the map.
The correct fares will be listed.
Yes. Seriously. This is what we have to look forward to. Accurate fare information and maps with north at the top. And I'm legitimately excited. Seriously.
Joe Klein really nails it here on the ethnic composition of the Iraqi Army and generally bogus nature of Iraqi state institutions. Really.
At any rate, it does occur to me now and again that the netroots could probably use some more good cops to go along with the bad cops. If, say, Klein not only got a torrent of critical email when he wrote something that pissed us off but also a torrent of positive email when he wrote something liberals liked, then he'd probably find himself writing more liberal stuff over the long haul, no? Being nice is no fun and I'm basically an asshole as a general matter, so I don't really want to do it, but surely a big community site like dKos could get the job done.
I've been anticipating my disappointment in the Arcade Fire's followup to Funeral for about two years now. So imagine my shock when I started listening to Neon Bible and found myself . . . totally not disappointed. Maybe this means I won't be disappointed by the successor to Set Yourself on Fire either?
Josh Marshall points out something I hadn't noticed -- there's been a big uptick in American helicopter crashes recently. It appears, however, that this is a result of better tactics and/or intelligence rather than the acquisition of better weapons.
This brings to mind one of the bitter ironies of the president's recent allegations that Iran is arming our foes in Iraq. The allegation appears, for one thing, to be significantly overstated, raising one's concerns that it's part of a propaganda campaign leading to war. At the same time, however, no matter what proportion of weapons in Iraq come from Iran, it's fairly clear that until very recently at least neither the Sunni insurgents nor the Mahdi Army nor the Badr Organization was an especially well-armed outfit. Compare any of them to an irregular fighting organization that Iran most definitely does equip like Hezbollah's military wing and you'll see that everyone in Iraq is looking rather crude. There's a lot more the Iranians could be handing out in terms of anti-tank missiles, rockets of various kinds, etc. This helicopter business is bad enough allready, but could easily become much worse if the administration continues its efforts to widen the war.
Chris Mooney finds the Bush administration lying and re-writing history to try to pretend that the president has always said human activity is responsible for global warming. As he says, it's "absolutely incredible."
Two years ago today, Jonah Goldberg threw down the following challenge to Juan Cole:
Since he doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there's another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I'm all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc.
Since Goldberg enjoys throwing a little smear-job in with his punditry, he also offered this:
One caveat: Because I don't think it's right to bet on such serious matters for personal gain, if I win, I'll donate the money to the USO. He can give it to the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or whatever his favorite charity is.
Got it. So we have a prediction, along with the insinuation that Professor Cole is a terrorist whereas Goldberg is a patriot. Obviously, Goldberg's prediction was incredibly wrong. The prediction, of course, came in the context of a larger argument about credibility and Goldberg's wildly off-base prediction tends to confirm precisely Cole's position in this argument -- Goldberg, while certainly a clever rhetoritician, basically has no idea what he's talking about. Meanwhile, somewhat hilariously, Goldberg thinks that pointing out that Cole turned his wager down should somehow spare him from mockery. The point, however, is still about the very, very poor prediction, not about Cole's skills as a gambler.
John Hollinger commenting on NBA players having disappointing seasons, concedes that "We had to anticipate a little slippage from Miami's vets this season . . . but that doesn't mean we should have expected Walker's 3-point Brick-O-Rama extravaganza." Really? We shouldn't? Walker has long demonstrate a mysterious passion for the inaccurate trey. This season he's taking 3.9 per game and only hitting 28 percent. Bad, yes. But in 2003-2004 he was taking 3.7 per game and only hitting 27 percent. In 1999-2000 he was taking 3.5 per game and only hitting 25.6 percent. For his career, Walker shoots 32.7 percent from downtown, which is better, but still not good enough. You don't really want guys regularly shooting threes unless they can hit them over a third of the time. Walker averages 4.8 a game over the course of his career.
One could write posts about this all day and all night, but Ezra Klein asks himself the good question of why The Washington Post is outsourcing its "Best of the Web" feature to Real Clear Politics, an intelligent but distinctly conservative, political site. Why not MyDD?
Similarly, I may as well admit to myself that I'm never going to be a New Yorker writer and express my consternation that they've got Jeffrey Goldberg profiling Joe Lieberman. It's a New Yorker article, so it's hardly "bad" as such, but the magazine has a bizarre hawkish monomania. Goldberg did some terrible pre-war work in their pages hyping all sorts of nonsense, was commissioned just a few weeks ago to write about how everyone to the left of Evan Bayh is an isolationist, and the other guy who writes about US foreign policy for the magazine is George Packer. Why does this not-even-ideological magazine adhere so rigidly to a right-of-center line on national security issues? It's the damn New Yorker it's not like nobody else would take the job if they were interested in ever letting a different point of view surface.
UPDATE: Sy Hersh, of course, stupid mistake. And Hendrick Hertzberg writes for the Talk of the Town. What I had in mind was that neither of them gets these sort of feature profile writing assignments about politicians and American politics. But it's much less clear-cut than what I wrote.
John Judis writing in The New Republic has a judicious take on the American Jewish Committee's accusations of anti-semitism. I'll quote from his conclusion, which makes a broader point:
There is a paradox that haunts these charges of anti-Semitism. On the one hand, Rosenfeld, Harris, and others want to deny that American Jews and American Jewish organizations like AIPAC suffer from dual loyalty in trying to influence U.S. foreign policy. It's anti-Semitic or contributes to anti-Semitism, they say, to make that charge. On the other hand, they want to demand of American Jewish intellectuals a certain loyalty to Israel, Israeli policies, and to Zionism as part of their being Jewish. They make dual loyalty an inescapable part of being Jewish in a world in which a Jewish state exists. And that's probably the case. Many Jews now suffer from dual loyalty--the same way that Cuban-Americans or Mexican-Americans do. By ignoring this dilemma--and, worse still, by charging those who acknowledge its existence with anti-Semitism--the critics of the new anti-Semitism are engaged in a flight from their own political selves. They are guilty of a certain kind of bad faith.
These controversies over anti-Semitism come, too, at a predictable and particularly unfortunate time in the discussion of U.S. foreign policy. The last time a similar brouhaha arose was in the 1970s, when Jewish peace organizations in the United States challenged Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. At the urging of the Israeli government, organizations like Breira were run out of town by their traditional, and more subservient, brethren. Partly as a result, the United States acquiesced in Israeli policies that, in the long run, have benefited neither the United States nor Israel. The same thing could happen again. A debate has already begun over U.S. policy toward Iran in which AIPAC and the Israeli government have expressed interest in the United States stopping at nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Fears of a new Holocaust--made more plausible by the very real anti-Semitism of Iran's president--have been sounded. What policies are in the interest of the United States? And of Israel? These are difficult questions, but they are not made easier to answer when critics of Israel and of the Israel lobby in the United States are charged with anti-Semitism.
I also have a piece on this subject up on The Guardian's Comment Is Free website.
I was in a cab earlier today and I heard a news report about the Pelosi jet story. It was a weird report. It went on for a while, making this out to be a big deal. Then at the very end, they brought some additional relevant information into play that made it clear this was much ado about nothing and then quoted Tony Snow pointing out that the whole thing was unfair. Then, in conclusion, was some crack about how it's amazing what kind of nonsense can get people talking in Washington these days.
Well, yes it is amazing, but they missed the whole story. This stuff doesn't just happen to get in the media because, well, DC is like that some weeks. These stories are ginned up in the conservative press in utter bad faith and then they bang away at them until the MSM starts reporting on them. Even if the reports finally conclude that there's nothing there, net harm is done to the Democratic Party and to the cause of progressive politics in America. Even worse, the reports never note that this whole much ado but nothing was not, in fact, about nothing but rather about the repeated and successful efforts of the conservative media to control the debate and engage in character assassination against their political adversaries.
That's why I don't like to see these kind of fake controversies dismissed a "silly season". The allegations are silly, but their existence is deadly serious. We're seeing it with the Amanda Marcotte pseudo-controversy and now again with the Pelosi plane pseudo-controversy and we're going to keep on seeing it until people demand that would-be serious reporters stop taking their cues from wingnut headquarters.
Via Jason Zengerle, a Christopher Beam Explainer in Slate gets to the first thing I thought of when I heard the crazy astronaut story -- do people have sex on the space shuttle? The truth appears to be a somewhat disappointing "no." But if it did happen, it'd be super-awesome, right? Slate says no:
Which raises the question: Would space sex be any good? Recent research suggests it would not. For one thing, zero gravity can induce nausea—a less-than-promising sign for would-be lovers. Astronauts also perspire a lot in flight, meaning sex without gravity would likely be hot, wet, and surrounded by small droplets of sweat. In addition, people normally experience lower blood pressure in space, which means reduced blood flow, which means … well, you know what that means.
Frankly, I find some of this unconvincing. Does "hot, wet, and surrounded by small droplets of sweat" really sound all that terrible?
So I wrote this over two years ago but I'm still waiting for an answer: What, exactly, about Rudy Giuliani's record as major makes him a person with a strong profile on national security issues?
Two sides can play this game, it appears. Chris Bowers explains:
Yesterday, you sent emails to Nedra Pickler of the AP asking her to point out Donahue's history of racially intolerant statements. Not only did she comply, in her new story, she included the exact same Donahue quote you asked her to include. You pressure works.
Impressive, in my view. You can click here to send an email of your own to news organizations complaining about their irresponsible coverage of this matter. Based on the AP's response to complaints, I would advise people to do it. Indeed, I might also note that Swampland is suddenly full of posts I find much more agreeable than the ones they were doing early on.
"The Gaza Palestinians celebrated the Hamas-Fatah ceasefire with rifle fire for over an hour," observesNew Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz, "Can these people do anything without gunshots?"
The answer is that while celebratory gunfire seems to be customary in many Arab nations, it is, in fact, possible for Arabs to do things without gunshots. Indeed, I've observed such non-gunshooting Arabs in person on several occassions. Strange but true. Palestinians, even!
"[I]t is impossible any more to call Vladimir Putin’s government 'democratic,'" says Thomas Friedman, "given the way it has neutered the Russian Parliament, intimidated or taken over much of the Russian press, subordinated the judiciary and coercively extended its control over the country’s key energy companies." And there's certainly a clear enough sense of "democratic" for which this is true. Later, Friedman re-iterates that "The Yeltsin democratic experiment is over."
This, though, is the question for America's Putin-haters: What Yeltsin democratic experiment? Putin, after all, didn't come out of nowhere. He was the handpicked successor of the Yeltsin regime, installed into office through some pretty dubious machinations. Putin didn't neuter the Russian parliament, he inherited a neutered parliament from the architect of the modern Russian state -- Boris Yeltsin. As nobody seems to remember, "in October 1993, President Boris Yeltsin chose a radical solution to settle his dispute with parliament: He called up tanks to shell the parliament building, blasting out his opponents." Later he revised the constitution, creating the current one under which Putin has been enjoying the incredibly broad powers of the Russian presidency. Under Putin, the state directly controls the bulk of the mass media and used said control to prevent a meaningful challenge to Putin's political authority. Under Yeltsin, by "contrast," the media was under the control of a tiny number of close-to-the-regime "oligarchs" who'd benefitted financially from Yeltsin's corruption and used their control over the press to prevent meaningful challenge to Yeltsin's political authority.
What's really changed since the Yeltsin era is the price of oil and gas. Russia under Yeltsin was a very weak country, reeling from decades of Communist mismanagement and a poorly-handled transition to a market economy. Yeltsin himself was heavily dependent on western countries and was unable to effectively challenge American or European strategic priorities. Putin, by contrast, has been enjoying an energy-led economic boom that's allowed Russia to once again become a somewhat consequential player on the world stage, to refuse to cooperate with the United States on issues that are priorities to us. Once that happened, it suddenly dawned on everyone -- hey! this isn't much of a democracy! And it isn't. But we should be spared the pretense that it ever was.
Jonah Goldberg's very, very indignant that someone would compare global warming denialists to Holocaust deniers. And, I tend to agree, it's not really the same thing. Maybe Jonah would be happier if we just said that the denialists, much like Charles Lindbergh, seems complacent in the face of clearly gathering threats and have some strange ideas about conspiracies in the media.
After all, Lindbergh's not as bad as people say.
What's more, I hear that Hillary Clinton, like most modern liberals, is secretly a fascist. Recall Brendan Nyhan's old compendium of Goldbergian disquiet about Nazi analogies.
Via Isaac Chotiner an interestingly contrarian Jon Zobenica essay in The Atlantic about Playboy. Zobenica's article is very, very funny so I'd advise you to read it. The argument, however, can be boiled down pretty quickly. He concedes that it's easy to follow John Leland's path and basically mock Playboy for its pretensions:
In the first issue of Playboy magazine, published in December 1953, Hugh M. Hefner wrote an essay speaking for its envisioned readers: ''We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.'' On first blush his commercial strategy here seemed straightforward: Men who make a habit of inviting female acquaintances in to talk Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz and sex will have a lot of free nights for reading Playboy magazine. Empires have been built on lesser principles.
This is fairly silly stuff, Zobenica concedes, but doesn't it actually look pretty good when compared to what you might find in an issue of a present-day lad mag like FHM? There does seem to be a qualitative difference between a slightly silly fantasy about inviting female acquaintances in to talk Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, and sex and a fantasy about a woman sitting in a plastic tub and covering herself with ice cream toppings. I'm not sure Zobenica's right at the end of the day -- there's something to be said for not gussying up your photos of scantily clad women as more than it is -- but it's a perspective worth considering.
"What is striking," sagely observes Charles Krauthammer, "is how much of the debate in Washington about Iraq has to do not with the war but with the words." In reality, the most striking thing is that Charles Krauthammer, America's Worst Columnist, continues to be published weekly in The Washington Post. Take, for example, this feeble effort at a gotcha. He notes that the Senate unanimously confirmed David Petraeus and then asks, "If you really oppose the surge, how can you not oppose the appointment of the man whose very mission is to carry it out?"
I promise that Jonah Goldberg could do better than this in his sleep. After a cup of coffee he'd probably even find a way to paint surge opponents as Nazi sympathizers.
To answer Krauthammer's question, nobody opposed Petraeus's appointment because there was no reason to oppose it. The "surge" is the president's plan and whichever general was in command in Iraq would be ordered to carry it out; someone has to be in command of the troops in Iraq even if the troops' mission is to withdraw; and just about everyone seems to think Petraeus is a good general. What's more, the president is always granted very broad deference in these kind of decisions.
What's striking is that Krauthammer obviously knows all of this and is just using his column as an opportunity to write in bad faith. The president is extremely unpopular since at this point everyone knows that he's inept, lazy, corrupt, etc. Petraeus, by contrast, gets good press. So the idea is to paint this as Petraeus's war rather than Bush's. Hence, war opponents should oppose Petraeus' appointment and the argument will be made even though it makes no sense.
A lot of folks are strolling back through the archives in search of Bill Donohue's past outbursts and so forth, but it's really worth taking a look at his less outrageous statements here in the Catholic League's press releases page. You'll quickly get a portrait of a petty, insane little man. See him assail Black Christman ("when it comes to blood and gore flicks, they never open on Christmas Day . . . It’s not so much the plot of ‘Black Christmas’ that bothers us—a wacko who terrorizes college girls at Christmas—it’s the fact that the Weinstein boys are back again, choosing a title and an opening date to make their latest statement"), attack Barbara Walters ("playing house mom to bigots"), defend Dennis Prager, and so forth.
There's nothing really all that offensive about these statements (except insofar as the Weinstein-bashing seems, in the context of Donohue's larger record of anti-semitism, to be partially about his anti-semitism) but they're . . . crazy. Nobody should be taking this guy seriously.
Drew Gilpin Faust poised to be Harvard's first woman president. Apparently, as a nation we've learned nothing from the recent dramatic failure of the whole "women in space" experiment. What's going to be next -- woman congressional leaders? Presidential candidates?
I asked yesterday what Rudy Giuliani's awesome national security credentials were supposed to be, and people replied that he seems mean and therefore tough and therefore good. Jonathan Alter makes an important point about this (via K-Drum): As any actual New Yorker should recall, Giuliani's kind of crazy. Don't get me wrong, I thought he was a pretty good mayor! I was too young (16, I think) to vote to re-elect Giuliani in 1997, but I'm exactly the sort of liberal New Yorker who he won over during his first term to be able to sweep to a crushing re-election victory.
It's worth recalling, though, that in his second term he basically went berserk. He'd always had "His ridiculously thin skin and mile-wide mean streak" but in his second term that came to dominate everything. There were two basic directions in which it would have been reasonable to take that term. He could have tried to apply the hard-charging zeal he'd brought to reforming police procedures to some other significant area of urban policy. Alternatively, he could have focused on keeping his policies in place while trying to heal some of the wounds that implementing them caused. Michael Bloomberg has basically managed to do both. Giuliani, in essence, did neither. Instead, he picked a series of bitter-yet-pointless fights that served to reveal both a basic vindictiveness and a fundamental lack of interest in policies outside the realm of law enforcement.
These are not characteristics which, when combined with the gross opportunism we're now seeing on various cultural issues, are desirable in a president. Also recall his post-9/11 efforts to suspend the City Charter and extend his term in office, adding a dose of power-hunger into the mix.
This is pretty sweet. As you may recall, New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz recently took to the pages of his magazine to accuse George Soros of being a "young cog in the Hitlerite wheel." As Soros points out (follow the link) this charge is false. Peretz, in his response to Soros' response, won't even admit what he accused Soros of doing much less concede that the allegation was false!
It seems to me that when a magazine falsely accuses someone of being a Nazi collaborator that a correction would be warranted.
Liberal bloggers sure are vile. Contrast their rantings to the civil debate hosted on the front page of RedState here Hilariously, that post actually comes with a specific request to "keep it clean" even though the poster already started it on a non-clean theme. One commenter is outraged about the dirty, dirty liberal bloggers. Then comes this paragon of civility which the proprietor, absurdly, endorses as "clean."
Jon Chait seems right about the semi-perverse consequences of blogger pressure on Edwards to retain his bloggers:
What this episode demonstrated is that, if you're a candidate, hiring a blogger may or may not win you the loyalty of that blogger's friends. But firing that blogger will certainly bring their wrath down upon you. But campaigns, of course, fire staffers pretty often. So why would you hire somebody you can't fire?
That seems right, right? If so, it seems like a price worth paying. Whether or not bloggers get hired by campaigns doesn't really matter. Whether or not the netroots can influence candidates to show some spine vis-à-vis right-wing pressure pressure groups does matter.
The essay is entertaining reading, but I think it's obvious why it's especially appealing to sensitive young men. Zobenica makes them feel like it's not only okay to read Playboy, but that it's mature and heck, even feminist. Fundamentally, this is just a rehashing of the infamous male excuse--"Hey, I was reading it for the articles!" I'm not an anti-porn feminist by any stretch of the imagination. But when I pick up Playboy, it's hard for me to take seriously the "Advisor" column's advice about sexually respecting your real-life girl when the centerfolds, month after month, have obviously fake gigantic boobs, identically hairless and child-like vaginas (Playboy seems to have a policy to never show women with visible vaginal lips), and completely flat stomachs.
This seems like a good point. In reality, though, the only issue of Playboy I've picked up since 1996 or so had an article proclaiming this site the best liberal blog. I only it read it for the egomania! By contrast, back in college I traded some frequent flier miles in for a Maxim subscription. I didn't renew when I would have had to pay actual money for it, but I won't deny that I read the issues. So Zobenica's article was, if anything, shitting all over me (not that I don't deserve it); I really just thought it was funny. I think that to form a real political opinion about Playboy I would need to read some issues of the magazine, but it seems to me that Dana's critique doesn't really undermine Zobenica's comparative defense of Playboy vis-à-vis the rising tide of laddism.
Mike Allen begins the attacks on Barack Obama while pretending to be reporting on the attacks others will be beginning shortly. Allen's first gotcha? "Why has he sometimes said his first name is Arabic, and other times Swahili?" As Brad DeLong points out, he's sometimes said "Barack" is an Arabic word because it is an Arabic word. At other times, he's described "Barack" as a Swahili word because . . . it's also a Swahili word. Yes, yes. Some words are words in more than one language. Shocking stuff. I also enjoyed Allen's account of why Obama is too liberal:
“Audacity of Hope” advocates civil unions for gay people (a position held by most national democratics), declaring tartly that Obama is not “willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.” He says he doesn’t “believe we strengthen the family by bullying or coercing people into the relationships we think are best for them – or by punishing those who fail to meet our standards of sexual propriety.”
He writes that Bill Clinton and conservatives turned out to be “right about welfare as it was previously structured.” He adds, “But we also need to admit that work alone does not ensure that people can rise out of poverty.”
So he has one stand that all Democrats adhere to, but has an unusually compelling, Bible-based rationale for it. That won't fly! Then he says Bill Clinton was right about welfare reform (so very liberal!) but also that "work alone does not ensure that people can rise out of poverty." But does anyone deny this? It's a matter of math. The minimum wage is so many dollars per hour, those dollars per hour times a forty hour workweek equals sub-poverty living for many families. To avoid being objectionably liberal these days we need to pretend all full-time work pays a non-poverty wage even when it doesn't?
UPDATE:Michael Crowley: "if this is the best people have got (which I doubt: the really saucy stuff will spill in more dramatic fashion) then Barack shouldn't sweat." Agreed.
Jerome Armstrong takes a look at the front loading of the 2008 Democratic primaries. As Ed Kilgore observes:
There are various theories about how front-loading will affect the 2008 contest. One is that it will actually magnify the importance of Iowa, where all indications are that there will be a close four-way race among Clinton, Edwards, Obama and Vilsack. Another is that the candidates with the most money and national support will "go long" and husband resources for delegate-rich post-SC states like CA and FL.
I would only observe that to a surprising extent there's no real "answer" to this question. A whole bunch of influential reporters (the mythic "gang of 500") could just decide they don't really want to spend winter in Des Moines, proclaim that under the new schedule Iowa doesn't really matter, and then all head down to Florida and California to cover the newly important warm-weather primaries. The whole process unfolds according to a series of more-or-less arbitrary pseudo-rules than the media (and to some extent big dollar donors) are just kind of making up as they go along.
Hillary Clinton tells the New Hampshire Union-Leader, "When I set forth my reasons for giving the President that authority, I said that it was not a vote for pre-emptive war." Obviously, though, the authority she did give the president was the authority to launch a pre-emptive war. More to the point, however, whatever Clinton thought she was doing in October 2002, if she disapproved of what Bush decided to do in March 2003 she could have spoken up. All I can find in a critical vein from Senator Clinton on Iraq in that period is this press release in which she criticized the president's homeland security funding and asks that additional monies by appropriated for this purpose when the inevitable Iraq supplemental comes down. She doesn't actually criticize the president's Iraq policy at all. On March 17, meanwhile, she issued a clear and unambiguous statement of support for Bush's position:
When the President of the United States addresses the nation about possible military action, it is a solemn occasion for every American. Tonight, the President gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to avoid war, and the world hopes that Saddam Hussein will finally hear this ultimatum, understand the severity of those words, and act accordingly. While we wish there were more international support for the effort to disarm Saddam Hussein, at this critical juncture it is important for all of us to come together in support of our troops and pray that, if war does occur, this mission is accomplished swiftly and decisively with minimum loss of life and civilian casualties. I have had the honor of meeting and speaking with many of our brave men and women in uniform. They are the best trained, equipped, and motivated military in the entire world, we support them fully and we are grateful for their courageous service in these difficult times.
This should all come as no surprise as Clinton was happy for years to be identified as a war supporter. Like millions of Americans, myself included, her views on the merits of the war have changed as we watched events unfold on the ground and as we gave the matter further thought. She might as well just say so, since pretending otherwise is pretty silly -- she's not an obscure figure, everybody knows she was for the war.
Let's be the generation that ends poverty in America. Every single person willing to work should be able to get job training that leads to a job, and earn a living wage that can pay the bills, and afford child care so their kids have a safe place to go when they work. Let's do this.
That's the way to go, isn't? To be frank, nobody can be quite sure precisely what combination of policies can get this done. The thing to do, even in the absence of political constraints, would be to try some stuff. You'd need to make some existing things more generous, you'd need to try some reforms here and there, you'd need to start some new initiatives and . . . you'd need to be prepared for the fact that some of it probably wouldn't work and you'd need to try something else. Goals are good.
Also note: "But all of this cannot come to pass until we bring an end to this war in Iraq. Most of you know I opposed this war from the start. I thought it was a tragic mistake." My instinct is that this is going to be a powerful point.
Hillary Clinton has a top-notch web operation, and here's what they've sent out in defense of the proposition that her support for the war was not, in fact, support for the war:
Hillary was referring to this statement from her October 10, 2002 speech, which is fairly straight forward:
My vote is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for uni-lateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose -- all of which carry grave dangers for our nation, for the rule of international law and for the peace and security of people throughout the world.
Yglesias says the only critical comment he could find that was critical of the rush to war was a press release about homeland security funding. During that time, as in her October 2002 speech, she advocated for an increased emphasis on inspections and a peaceful solution. Here are some citations:
JANUARY 2003: HILLARY SENDS LETTER TO POWELL, URGES HIM TO CONTINUE ROBUST INSPECTIONS: "If our words about supporting UN inspectors have any meaning and if we truly want the United Nations to be effective, we must act to support the UN arms inspectors ...Additionally if we are truly serious about supporting the UN inspections we should increase our intelligence support to the inspectors." [Letter to Colin Powell, 1/31/03]
MARCH 2003: HILLARY URGES 'PEACEFUL SOLUTION,' PUSHES BUSH TO 'ENLIST MORE SUPPORT' FROM ALLIES: "'It is preferable that we do this in a peaceful manner through coercive inspection'...[T]he senator said the Bush administration still had work to do at convincing the American public and the rest of the world that Hussein presented a real threat that might require military action. 'The administration should continue to try to enlist more support,' she added." [AP, 3/3/03]
Honestly, I think this is a little bit childish and something of an insult to the intelligence of liberals everywhere. I'm opening to forgiving candidates who supported the war. Lots of people supported the war. I supported the war. And Hillary Clinton supported the war. When the war began, Clinton made a statement about it. I quoted that statement yesterday and you can read it here. It was a statement of support for the war.
Everybody knows this and it's silly to pretend otherwise. The idea that we're now supposed to spend the time between today and Iowa having a debate about whether or not Clinton backed a pre-emptive military attack on Iraq is a little bit insane. The war occurred, it occurred with her support, and it was a pre-emptive war. I don't think this is a difficult question.
Is there some reason you can't donat eto political candidates (Obama, Clinton) using PayPal? Also, when did the max contribution go from $2,000 to $2,300? Did McCain-Feingold index the cap to inflation? And why is the Clinton campaign asking for contributions of up to $4,600? I understand you can de facto double the limit by donating once for the primary and once for the general election, but this seems different.
Turning to Iraq, yesterday was a good day. I was thrilled that Saddam Hussein had finally been captured. Like many of you, I was glued to the television and the radio as I went about my daily business. We owe a great debt of gratitude to our troops, to the president, to our intelligence services, to all who had a hand in apprehending Saddam. Now he will be brought to justice, and we hope that the prospects for peace and stability in Iraq will improve.
I was especially pleased that the capture was led by the 4th Infantry Division, whom I visited in Kirkuk and had a a briefing from the commander, General Odierno, and during that briefing was given some insights into the efforts to apprehend Saddam. And it's very good news indeed that they have come to fruition.
This moment, however, cannot be just about congratulating ourselves and the Iraqi people for this capture. It should be a moment where we step back and consider how now to go forward. What is it we can do today, based on the circumstances of yesterday, that will strengthen our hand and move the Iraqis closer to a time when they can have self-government and create a stable, free, democratic Iraq?
I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote. I have had many disputes and disagreements with the administration over how that authority has been used, but I stand by the vote to provide the authority because I think it was a necessary step in order to maximize the outcome that did occur in the Security Council with the unanimous vote to send in inspectors. And I also knew that our military forces would be successful. But what we did not appreciate fully and what the administration was unprepared for was what would happen the day after.
It has been a continuing theme of my criticism and others that we would be further along, we would have more legitimacy, we would diminish the opposition and resentment that is fueling whatever remains of the insurgency if we had been willing to move to internationalize our presence and further action in Iraq. I believe that today. And in fact, I think that we now have a new opportunity for the administration to do just that.
I suppose you could subject this to some tortured readings but, again, the position seems fairly clear. Clinton voted to give Bush the authority to launch a war, knowing full well what she was doing. She has various disagreements with Bush's conduct of the war, but not with the basic strategic logic underpinning it. In December 2003, she continues to support the war and to support the president's maximalist war aims of "a stable, free, democratic Iraq."
I'm not entirely sure whether or not I ever attended a Rangers game when I was a kid. If I did, though, I don't remember it. Last night, however, courtesy of a friend I was able to watch the Caps game from the Steptoe & Johnson luxury suite (because nothing says hockey like a white-shoe law firm ... even funnier, they share the suite with a French company) and one can't help ask oneself, "where are the cheerleaders?" My buddy was trying to tell me it would be too hard to recruit people with the requisite skating skills, but I don't find that very convincing, the world must be awash in young women who used to figure skate and then had to abandon their olympic dreams. I'd certainly believe that per-unit labor costs for ice cheerleaders might be higher than for, say, the Wizards Dance Team but you could address that by simply fielding a smaller squad, there's no need to go down to zero.
I wonder sometimes if there's a common psychological profile to blogging's early adopters. One interesting data point is that I, like Amanda and Atrios absolutely despise talking on the phone. This is why even though I like writing and I like politics, I could never in a million years be a "real" political journalist. I can get through a conversation with, say, my dad but as a general matter I just absolutely hate to talk on the phone and will always use email, IM, or SMS if it's even vaguely plausible as a substitute.
In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the "Axis of Evil." Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush's controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn't ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan's ringing denunciations of the "evil empire."
Once again, Iran's reformists were knocked back on their heels. "Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized," says Adeli. "The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America's intentions."
In short, Michael Gerson and Condoleezza Rice, purely in order to make a speech that (a) sounded good, and (b) pretended not to be exclusively about Iraq, set the United States on a collision course with Iran. That's really got to be a historic speechwriting blunder.
Naturally enough, Gerson's paid a high price for his role in instigating this destructive conflict. After continuing to serve for years in the White House he's been forced to accept a humiliating position as a Council on Foreign Relations fellow and a columnist for some obscure magazine called Newsweek.
As you've all no doubt heard, John Howard made the odd decision to lash out and attack Barack Obama today. One thing I haven't seen mentioned on American blogs is that I know Howard's Australian critics think he's a racist. As in John Quiggin's observation that "Whenever it has appeared possible to ride a wave of prejudice in Australia, Howard has sought to do so, sometimes successfully and sometimes not." So his brief intervention into US politics may just be part of that pattern and have nothing in particular to do with Obama, Iraq, our election, etc.
Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist, said in an interview: “It’s important for all Democrats to keep the word ‘mistake’ firmly on the Republicans and on President Bush. Senator Clinton has been very clear that we, as a party, should keep the focus on Bush — these were his mistakes. Ultimately that’s very important, not just for her, but for the entire Democratic party.”
Ah, Mark Penn; innerant font of polling wisdom for DLC and HRC alike. His October 5, 2004 op-ed is always worth revisiting:
But after Bush changed his campaign tactics to tack back toward the center, Kerry believed his drop in the polls could be fixed by adding more "edge" to his message. He moved to make his opposition to Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq the centerpiece of his campaign message, a message with tremendous appeal to the Democratic base but whose appeal to swing voters is uncertain. Now there is a renewed opportunity to win back this group of voters who report that they have already definitely decided their vote, but who have repeatedly changed their minds this year. . . .
We might all learn a lesson from Bill Clinton in 1992. He won by making the Persian Gulf War irrelevant to the election. He focused on swing voters, with plans for welfare reform and middle-class tax cuts, and he drove the economy, not the war, as the central defining issue. In 1996 he focused on a plan to balance the budget and cruised to a landslide victory.
The difference between 1992 and 2004 (or 2008 for that matter) is, obviously, that the war was over by 1992, which made it much easier to render irrelevant. The idea that swing voters don't care about the deployment of over 100,000 American soldiers and Marines into a war zone, meanwhile, strikes me as slightly insane. The idea of Mark Penn serving as chief strategist for a presidential nominee (or, worse, a president) should send shivers down the spine of liberals everywhere.
To be clear, the reason I say liberals should fear Mark Penn actually has little-to-nothing to do with Iraq. My strong guess is that Penn and I disagree about foreign policy, but that would just be inference based on the people and organizations he's associated with; he doesn't have a strong profile on the topic and I don't really know what it thinks. The trouble with Penn is his monomaniacal insistence that what the Democratic Party needs to do is move to the right on economic issues in hopes of becoming more appealing to prosperous white men.
I'm not sure if Jon Chait's 2002 Penn takedown is available to non-subscribers (maybe this works) but if so it should be read. Alternatively, this (PDF) from Ruy Teixeira makes many of the same points albeit at greater length. The "populism" debate inside the Democratic Party isn't really my issue and I have mixed feelings about some aspects of it, but I think it's fairly clear to everyone that relatively downscale white voters -- especially, but not exclusively, women -- who tend to have progressive views on many topics are where the electoral action is. I bet these guys like Penn's ideas, though.
Deranged ersatz theologean Michael Novak has a truly inspired argument about why the US shouldn't take the lead in tackling global warming even though we're the ones using the lion's share of the energy:
A reader wrote to Jonah the other day that Americans constitute 5 % of the world's population but use 25% of the world's energy. Another way to look at it is to ask, What is energy? It used to be the backs of humans and animals. Then it was water wheels and wind mills. Surely, America today does not use a large proportion of the world's horse power, oxen power, and other old-fashioned sources of energy. Today, when we say "energy," we usually mean gasoline for the combustion engine, nuclear power, electricity, the use of natural gas, modern sources like that. The United States pioneered in virtually every source of what in the modern world counts as energy. You might say we invented nearly 100 % of it, and have already shared about 75% of it with others. Not as good as we might yet do (as China and India become the world's largest users of modern energy), but pretty darn good, don't you think?
Seriously. People publish articles this guy writes. The 25 percent calculation is off-base because it doesn't count oxen?
It's interesting how money impacts political ideas. One doubts that any of these various rightwingers were actually humming along and then got bribed by energy companies to come up with the outlandish conservative arguments you here on this score. Rather, the money's just sort of out there ready to flow to individuals who make outlandish arguments and to publications and institutions that associate themselves with such people and such arguments. Under the circumstances, the human mind proves remarkably supple and creative. Next thing you know, the Bangladeshis are all in our debt for generously allowing them to burn gasoline so who cares if they wind up drowning when the glaciers melt.
Lots of people have noted Bill Kristol's efforts to argue that 1858-vintage Barack Obama would have been a slavery supporter. The really noteworthy thing here, however, isn't Kristol's novel take on race relations, but his continuing effort to paint Abraham Lincoln as some kind of Kristol-style war enthusiast. Clearly, Lincoln was no pacifist, but nothing could be further from the truth. He was a staunch opponent of the Mexican War which he saw as driven by the political power of slaveholders and a desire to expand the same, rather than by the moral principles of international relations or a sound assessment of the national interest. Nor was he eager to embrace a military conflict with the South. He believed that slavery was a great evil, but also saw that civil war would be incredibly destructive, a great evil of its own. Lincoln opposed Stephen Douglas' compromise-at-any-cost mentality that would merely serve to further entrench slavery. His hope, however, was to preserve the union peacefully and end slavery through the methods of the political process.
It's harder to imagine anything more un-Kristolian than Lincoln's reflections on all this in the second inaugural address:
Josh Marshall is, if anything, being significantly too generous to the attack Iran brigades in his answer to his third question "Would successful aggressive action against Iran materially improve our current situation in Iraq?" It's obvious, I think, that aggressive action against Iran would make our situation in Iraq much, much worse. We can debate how much of what we see in Iraq today Iran is responsible for; I think it's clear the administration is seriously exaggerating this, but it sort of doesn't matter. What can't be debated is that much more could be done. Shiite groups could be spending more time killing American troops. What's more, Iran could be giving such groups much better weapons than they have today. As I've pointed out before, just look at Hezbollah, whose weaponry is vastly more sophisticated than anything we've seen in Iraq. If we start bombing Iran, Iran has at its disposal cheap, effective means of retaliating against US forces in Iraq.
Bombing Iran in response to alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq won't help anything in Iraq in part, I think, because it isn't designed to. Rather, the Bush administration thinks it can't sell a second counterproliferation war against a Gulf country beginning with "Ira" because it's just too absurd. Hence, it would be nice to gin up a casus belli with Iran that's only tangentially related to the nuclear program. Not that bombing will help us with that problem either, but it's at least widely believed that it will. I don't think even the Bush administration is dumb enough to think that attacking Iran will help stabilize things in Iraq; the Iran-Iraq nexus is just a red herring designed to make it politically difficult to oppose what they're doing.
It's quite true as GFR and Greg Sargent point out that Hillary Clinton, like her husband, seems to get uniquely bad treatment at the hands of the MSM. Since a big part of what bloggers do is attack the press for being unfair to Democrats, one assumes this means we'll see many newspapers articles being unfair to Clinton and many blog posts complaining about them.
Still, I think it's important for liberals not to let Clinton's good fortune in her enemies distract people from basic realities. The precise nuances of what everyone's said about Iran so far aside, it's pretty clear that Edwards and Clinton have similar records as officeholders, that Obama has a somewhat more liberal record than those two, and that Edwards has positioned himself to the left of Obama and Clinton in terms of what he's laid out so far in the campaign. Precisely how one should evaluate Edwards versus Obama in that context isn't obvious to me. And, again, it doesn't just follow from the fact that Clinton is clearly the least liberal of the three that she shouldn't be the Democratic nominee. Perhaps you, like Clinton, have views that aren't especially liberal. Alternatively, perhaps you think Clinton's less-liberal positioning is a price that needs to be paid for electoral purposes. I can think of any number of things one might say about this and, obviously, there's more to life than just ideology -- competence, intelligence, judgment, character, etc. all matter.
But insofar as we're talking about ideology, we should be clear. Clinton, like her husband, is both hated by the right and treated unfairly by the press and a not very liberal politician, coming from the party's more centrist wing and flanked by advisors from the same. In a general election, she'd clearly be the progressive choice against Giuliani, McCain, Romney, etc. but is clearly the less progressive choice vis-a-vis Edwards and Obama. I don't think the fact that she's mistreated by the press should distract people from this basic point. What's more, garnering bad press is a bug, not a feature, when you're looking for a candidate. Which is all, I suppose, by way of introducing my Guardian piece about Clinton's Iraq War revisionism.
I caught some of To The Point on NPR yesterday (I believe you can get a podcast of the episode here) in particular, the segment where they were talking about the Bush administration's allegations abotu Iranian weapons. It's really one of the best shows on the radio, so it was no surprise to see that this was a very informative rundown spelling out what, exactly, was being alleged, which elements there was circumstantial evidence for, which elements the evidence was more direct for, what we know and don't know about the organization of the Iranian government, etc.
Still, though, there was a disturbing atmosphere of propaganda in the air. Everything was introduced as "the military claims" or "military intelligence claims," never "the Bush administration claims" even though you'd have to be pretty foolish not to see this as an administration initiative. The wider context of Iran policy debates was missing in action. Instead, there were just some claims; claims coming from the military; claims that might be wrong in some respect, but were clearly issued in good faith. It's a pretty bad scene. You might think that having gone through this exact same scenario a few years ago something would have been learned. Instead what mostly seems to have been learned is that the administration can't afford to have its own claims attributed to itself and so wants to have them attributed to military intelligence.
Mortar rounds and rockets slammed into Somalia’s capital early Monday in a series of attacks that killed a six-year-old boy and his father as they slept and wounded at least seven people, witnesses said.
Gee, who could have predicted that. The strategic folly is that now that the US and Ethiopia have intervened so heavily against the Somali Islamists, it probably will become the case that a formerly local conflict takes on more of the aspects of a bin Laden-style global jihad; at least some of the young men who cut their teeth in the Somali insurgency will probably end up moving on elsewhere. Already, destabilization is prompting large, deadly refugee flows. The United States, in our way, has come up with the useful solution that the Transitional Federal Institutions should talk to Sheikh Sharif Ahmed who's believed to be the leader of the more moderate faction of the Islamic Courts Union. Perhaps bringing him on board could generate national reconciliation?
But the TFI Prime Minister wants none of it, counting on the fact that, at the end of the day, the U.S. is going to keep backing him as long as he can describe his adversaries as linked to al-Qaeda.
Oh, man. As part of The New Republic continuing campaign to demonstrate that there's no Israel Lobby and if there is it would never try to silence anyone, today's website features a second rebuttal to John Judis's article defending Israel critics against charges of anti-semitism:
It is ironic that Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, lends credibility to accusations of dual loyalty. If this is the case, then TNR is certainly guilty, for, more than any other journal of opinion, it has made the case that support for Israel should be a key component of U.S. foreign policy. Judis lends credence to a double standard. When some Jewish intellectuals in the 1980s made the case in favor of NATO's hard line in Europe in the face of the Soviet Union's "peace offensive," no one accused them of having dual loyalty to the NATO countries of Western Europe, even though they were supporting policies of extended nuclear deterrence. Then, as now, they argued that it was in the vital interests of the United States to take these measures.
To me, the striking thing is how infrequent it is to actually see non-critics of America's Israel policy make the argument that current policy serves the vital interests of the United States (TNR's editorial line, for example, from which some authors obviously deviate, has tended to deny that American policy should be governed by considerations of the national interests; the recent TNR article on the Iranian nuclear program didn't so much as mention American interests). I would genuinely be interested to read an article making the case that it serves American interests to make Israel the largest recipient of American foreign aid dollars. Were someone to put together a strong argument to that effect, then others could read it and put together counterarguments. I think we could, then, have a reasonably civil disagreement about a fairly standard political question, "should our policies be like this or would it be better to change them like this?" instead of a vicious argument about whether Israel is "bad" or its critics are anti-semites.
After all, it's not as if the US's failure to appropriate $3 billion in annual aid to Costa Rica is driven by a sense that Costa Rica is a uniquely horrible country. In fact, it's a rather nice country. We're just not that generous with our foreign aid. But Israel's a weird target for all that aid. Why not a poorer country like Bangladesh? Or one more objectively threatened like Taiwan? At the end of the day, I don't think a failure to think these things through actually constitutes "dual loyalties," it just constitutes a failure to think these things through. A rigorous assessment of national interests might prompt a clash of sentiments or loyalties, so people simply don't do it; and the core element of America's policy vis-à-vis Israel -- heavy financial support whose rationale is unclear -- just goes undiscussed.
So . . . Amanda Marcotte's resigned from the Edwards campaign after all, apparently once a fairly tame remark in her review of Children of Men prompted another Donohue outburst. Marcotte's explanation -- roughly that she didn't want to feel constrained in what she could write, and also that she didn't want to drag the Edwards campaign down -- makes perfect sense. Indeed, that's why think I wouldn't take a job even with a candidate I was super-enthusiastic about -- I like to speak (and blog) my mind in a way that's not conducive to being on the staff of a presidential campaign.
But that's where things get puzzling to me. How is it that the Edwards campaign didn't manage to say in advance that people were going to have to stop blogging if they want to work on the campaign? Similarly, based on their own reaction to the controversy it appears that nobody at the campaign decided to vet Marcotte before they hired her? Presumably, these were both decisions handled at a fairly low level (I doubt Edwards himself was huddled in a room with three top advisors discussing blog hiring policy for hours until after controversies started breaking out) but it all seems a little amateurish. Whoever came up with the health care plan seems really smart, maybe they should ask his or her advice on more things.
Good news, I would say. Of course the fly in the ointment is that we could have gotten a better version of this deal years and years ago had Bush and Cheney not stomped on it. The tragedy of it is that not only could we have gotten this deal years ago, but the personnel who were ready to get it have been there inside the administration all along, being overruled by the blinkered ideogues they work for.
I was joking earlier today that we should just send Christopher Hill to Teheran to try and work something out. It turns out, though, that Hill's opposite number as Assistant Secretary for Near East Affairs David Welch is another career foreign servive officer with a long record. Odds are he could do a fine job, too, were it not for the fact that, like the rest of the Cossacks, he works for a crazy Czar.
One thing to consider about the Glenn Reynolds / Hugh Hewitt assassination strategy for coping with the Iranian nuclear program ("we should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists") beyond the obvious is how we once again see conservatives (or in Reynolds' case "libertarians") displaying an almost childlike faith in the competence, honesty, and efficacy of the federal bureacracy insofar as that bureacracy is tasked with dishing out lethal force that they would never in a million years ascribe to, say, the people in charge of the Endangered Species Act.
I mean, how is this going to work? We're talking, presumably, about the clandestine branches of the same intelligence agencies who can't decide what the state of the Iranian nuclear program is, don't know where Iran's nuclear facilities are, and are unsure who, if anyone, in the Iranian government is responsible for Iranian weapons winding up in Iraq. Nevertheless, Reynolds believes they have an off-the-shelf plan for placing assasins in close proximity to key Iranian nuclear scientists. But not only for doing this, but for doing it quietly! American agents are infiltrating Iran killing Iranian scientists and religious leaders and none of them get caught. How? Are there really dozens of Farsi-speaking ninjas working for the CIA? I was going to compare this to a fun-but-stupid movie like The Bourne Identity but the point of that movie (and its sequal) is actually that if you somehow did build a hyper-competent utterly secret government agency it would likely become a cesspool of corruption and abuses of power.
Okay. In October of 2003 I went to the New American Strategies for Peace and Security Conference. A widish range of views was represented there, but it was a basically anti-war group." Great damage was done to America's own security and to the fabric of multilateral cooperation by the manner in which the United States pursued virtually unilateral war in Iraq," said the mission statement, "While the immediate war aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein succeeded, the collateral damage was immense, and it continues." In short, a speech before this group would have been a good time for a US Senator who'd seemingly voted in favor of the war a year ealier to clarify that she thought invading Iraq had been a mistake.
If you read the speech Senator Hillary Clinton actually gave, I think you'll see that's not what happened. She criticized many aspects of the Bush administration's conduct of the war, voiced support for the basic mission ("we seek to build democratic institutions in Iraq"), and certainly didn't say anything that would tend to contradict one's basic intuition that the pro-war vote was a pro-war vote. And on some level, I think she deserves credit for all that. It's easy to go into a room and tell people what they want to hear, but she didn't.
I forgot to link to any articles about it, but it's pretty hilarious that Etan Thomas and Brendan Haywood keep getting into fights. One always wishes that somehow Thomas' mind, heart, or spirit could be transplanted into Brendan Haywood's body. He looks like a very good center, but sure doesn't play like it. I dunno how many times the fans have been reduced to incoherent rage watching him blow a layup when he could have dunked it.
Is this "new Baghdad crackdown"part of the new Baghdad security initiative, or is it an even newer plan that supersedes the old new plan Bush and Maliki announced just after the New Year?
My first instinct was to go with Sleeping Beauty, since it's right there in the name -- she's hot. But then, of course, there's Belle. And for that matter, Snow White is "the fairest of them all." I'm afraid that Princess Jasmine, Cinderella, and Ariel are out of luck.
I think the only time I've ever mentioned Roger Cohen on this site was to complain about something, but today's piece about why it's time for "an end to uncritical American support of Israel, a real push to persuade Olmert to engage with Abbas, enough boldness to reach beyond the details to a vision of what is needed to bring a Palestinian state into being." A minor emendation would be that Cohen says "the Democrats who now control Capitol Hill have shown little inclination to debate a related subject, Israel and Palestine, where a shift in American policy at a time of fluidity could make an important difference." The truth is in some ways better and in other ways worse. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs' Middle East Subcommittee is having a hearing today on the "Next Steps in Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process." The trouble is that the subcommittee's arranged for the roster of witnesses to be former AIPACer Martin Indyk, David Makovsky from WINEP, and Daniel Pipes.
On the other hand, as Daniel Levy points out there are some positive developments as well that people could lend their support to:
Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA) has introduced House Resolution 143 urging the President to appoint a Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. H. Res. 143 has already attracted a number of co-sponsors, including Jewish members and Congress’ only Muslim member. (Co-sponsors include Blumenauer (D-OR), Ellison (D-MN), Klein (D-FL), McCollum (D-MN), Schiff (D-CA)). H. Res. 143 includes a lot of sensible language such as “it is directly in the national interest of the US to reengage both sides…a lasting peace…will reduce tension in the region…help repair America’s image in the international community…and help reduce Iranian influence in the region” (Read the full resolution here and for the APN campaign see here).
One thing I worry about on the Iraq issue is that the anti-war side has tended to be fighting with one hand tied behind our back. People mostly try to be relatively honest about the fact that leaving Iraq is not likely to produce a particularly happy outcome, people who nominally agree with us about the policy write columns saying we're still being too cozy, and meanwhile on the other side people just make up all kinds of crazy lies. It's a difficult way to win an argument. So I'm glad Robert Dreyfuss went and wrote up (via Kevin Drum) the optimist's guide to leaving Iraq since, as he says, "If it was foolish to accept the best-case assumptions that led us to invade Iraq, it's also foolish not to question the worst-case assumptions that undergird arguments for staying."
Fundamentally, I don't think anyone really does or can know what will happen when we leave. I personally tend to be a pessimist as a general matter and would put my bet on a fairly poor outcome if you made me. But things also could go not so bad. In particularly, the widely held view that you'd see a Saudi Arabia versus Iran proxy war inside Iraq strikes me as unsupported. Just over the past few months those two countries have been working together to try to prevent violence and disorder in Lebanon and there's no particular reason to think they couldn't do the same in Iraq.
Take a look at Amanda Marcotte's hate mail (Paul Bernard of Scottsdale, Arizona writes "i like the way you trash talk i don’t particularly want to have sex with you but i would like a blow job") -- pretty mind-blowing stuff.
To me, the most interesting thing about the John Amaechi book isn't his sexual orientation, but his frank admission (via Steve Sailer) that he didn't like playing basketball and didn't try very hard at it. "I respect the game of pro basketball. I just don't think it's all that important. I wasn't going to be embarrassed by Jerry Sloan because basketball had a proper role in my balanced life and I didn't blindly worship a game he made pretty much the entirety of his existence." Or, later in the book, "Why does the performance of so many players decline after they sign multiyear guaranteed deals? It's a little thing called human nature. Plenty of guys - Karl Malone and John Stockton are the obvious examples - play hard no matter how much they make. Other guys lack the discipline. Predicting which player falls into which category is the key to scouting."
This connects to something we've discussed before -- the number of people who have the baseline physical characteristics necessary to be an effective NBA center is vanishingly small. This creates an unusual situation where people can get paid millions of dollars to play that role without being especially committed to doing it well. 6' 4" men are reasonably rare, but also common enough that they're only going to get to be NBA players through fanatical devotion to the game. A really big guy, though, can make it at least marginally without even enjoying basketball. You also get intermediate cases like the frustrating Brendan Haywood who seems to be someone who realizes he can continue to make millions for years and years as a mediocre center with an inconsistent effort level.
Chris Cillizza runs down some polling indicating a healthy, albeit surmountable, level of skepticism about the wisdom of voting for a Mormon among Republican primary voters. In some ways, I think this may be a bigger problem for Romney than Cillizza quite sees. The trouble, as I see it, has to do with Romney's convenient conversion to social conservatism over the past two years or so. One assumes that to win, Romney is going to need to talk about his newfound commitment to abortion-banning and gay-hating and the most obvious way to do that would be within the context of talking about his deep Christian faith and so forth. But while that might work great for a Protestant or a Catholic, I don't think it goes over so well if your deep faith is something most Christians consider weird and, indeed, not really Christian.
Similarly, it's hard to do the standard JFK-style "my faith is not an issue" thing if you're simultaneously trying to convince politically mobilized Christian traditionalists that you're the candidate for them. It seems to me that this winds up being a very difficult sweet spot to locate. Indeed, under normal circumstances it would seem almost crippling to me. Romney's good fortune, however, is that the leading contenders are Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, neither of whom are exactly what you'd call social conservative heros either.
I want to say something about Undersecretary of State Nick Burns' presentation on Iran policy which I attended this afternoon, but for now just follow along with Spencer Ackerman's points that Burns says it's now US policy that al-Qaeda is less important than Iran and his willingness to go beyond the president's claims about the Iranian government's culpability for weapons getting into Iran. Meanwhile, here we have Hillary Clinton following the precedent that's been set by Harry Reid and some other Democratic leaders in staking out a clear stance on presidential authority to initiate a war with Iran:
It would be a mistake of historical proportion if the administration thought that the 2002 resolution authorizing force against Iraq was a blank check for the use of force against Iran without further Congressional authorization. Nor should the president think that the 2002 resolution authorizing force after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in any way authorizes force against Iran. If the administration believes that any, any use of force against Iran is necessary, the president must come to Congress to seek that authority.
As a matter of politics, optics, etc. I like to hear this kind of thing from our major Democratic legislators. As a citizen concerned about the course of events in the world, the problem is that I continue to think it's false. The War Powers Act grants the president authority to initiate hostilities against anyone he likes for a period of sixty days. The Clinton administration's Department of Justice, meanwhile, took the view that, by granting the Clinton administration's request for an emergency supplemental appropriation for military operations in Kosovo, congress had implicitly authorized the continuation of hostilities after the sixty day time frame. The Bush administration, for obvious reasons, is unlikely to take a more restrictive view of presidential power in this regard than did its predecessor. Meanwhile, congress is very unlikely to refuse to grant a supplemental appropriation to continue hostilities if they are initiated -- just look at their view on providing supplemental appropriations for Iraq.
UPDATE: Sorry, my initial effort to cut-and-paste what Clinton said went a bit awry and I had her saying the wrong thing. The correct line is up there now.
UPDATE II: Okay, as Henley points out, the War Powers Act actually requires "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." Obviously, the administration is already laying the groundwork for a suitable predicate along these lines with this IED business. Which, when you think about it, is more than Clinton bothered to do in Kosovo.
Perhaps I'm misreading, but it seems to me that in his reply to Alan Wolfe David Greenberg seems to indicate that to accuse Israel of "war crimes" is, as such, to engage in anti-semitism. Ironically, however, when going through his list of who the anti-semites are, Greenberg clarifies: "I don't mean mere critics of Israeli policies, such as of the occupation of the West Bank or the building of the security fence or of the Lebanon incursion. Criticize away!" Well, okay, fair enough. But what if one were to criticize the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in part on the grounds that the settlement-construction program there, initiated in the 70s but continuing throughout the Oslo era, was and is in violation of international law. In short, war crimes have been committed. Similarly, Human Rights Watch has documented war crimes on both sides of the Summer War in Lebanon.
Is it really anti-semitism to point this out?
Similarly, to Jeffrey Herf anyone who thinks the "Israel lobby" (this is not really a term I'm enthusiastic about) is more powerful than Herf does is an anti-semite. Again, I would suggest he think harder about this. Clearly, people are going to disagree about precisely how powerful any given lobbying group is; these disagreements can't all be chalked up to various forms of racial animosity. If Mearsheimer and Walt overestimate the power of the Israel lobby, mightn't they just be mistaken? Especially in the absence of actual evidence that Mearsheimer, Walt, Jimmy Carter, Kenneth Roth, etc. actually have some sort of animosity toward Jewish people, isn't it safer to conclude that disagreements about Israel's policies and America's policies toward Israel are just disagreements about controversial political issues? People say a lot of heated things in political debates.
Ken Baer, author of Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton, an excellent sympathetic history of the DLC, on Iran policy: "The reason why Obama, Clinton, and Edwards are all refusing to take the military option off the table is because there is no credible expert on Iran, nonproliferation, or any combination of the two who would advise them to do so."
Really? None? Ray Takeyh, Council on Foreign Relations Fellow and author of two books on Iran along with Vali Nasr, another CFR fellow and author of three books on Iran or Shia politics, think we should eschew military threats in favor of engagement. Joseph Cirincione, formerly senior associate and director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and currently something or other at the Center for American Progress, thinks there's no military option whatsoever here. Baer vents some more:
And as for those who doubt the strategy of no nukes, no options off the table, my only question is: what is that based on? Again, is there any person with real experience with the Iranians, diplomacy, or nonproliferation who has argued that? If so, let’s hear it. But – to my mind – rightly, the major candidates are listening to seasoned experts on this issue, and are thus sticking with the above formulation of no nuclear Iran, no options off the table.
With all due respect, it seems to me that Democratic candidates are saying what Baer thinks they should say because this is what people like Baer -- consultants and speechwriters -- are saying they should say. Takeyh, Nasr, and Cirincione aren't obscure figures; the only way you could reach the conclusion that all credible experts think military options should be on the table would be if you hadn't made any effort to canvass the experts. Contrary to Baer's assertions, one can think the military option should be off the table without either being a pacifist or having one's head in the sand about the potentially problematic consequences of a nuclear Iran. The problem with the military option is that it's more likely to speed up Iranian acquisition of a nuclear bomb than it is to halt it. Thus, if you're concerned about an Iranian nuclear weapon -- as opposed to, say, "looking tough on defense" -- you'll favor policies likely to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, rather than policy likely to "look tough" while failing.
In re: the subject below, GFR says she thinks "it would be a politically disqualifying act for any presidential candidate to take military action off the table in dealing with a country that is a potential regional threat, and that it would be folly for any group on the left to demand this of them." As I say, my strong guess is that this is what Ken Baer thinks as well, since he is an experienced political consultant but doesn't seem to discuss the merits of this issue with a particularly wide range of experts.
I'm open to that possibility. There are many things which I believe to be true which I also believe it would be unwise to say in a presidential campaign. On the other hand, I have no idea what the evidentiary basis for the claim that saying "all options are on the table" with Iran is necessary to be politically viable in America. Before everyone rushes to accept that judgment, I think people should present some backing for the claim. Polling data, focus groups, something. Similarly, before liberals demand that candidates explicitly foreswear military options we should consider that politics is politics. My preference would be for candidates to not say anything at all about whether or not military options are "on the table." I think inserting that phrase into speeches is a hollow effort to "look tough" that accomplishes nothing, while inserting the reverse phrase into speeches would be weird. Candidates should just say what they think we should do.
People may have missed it, but in comments yesterday Marty Lederman left the following remarks with regard to presidential war powers:
1. The War Powers Resolution does not prohibit any initiation of hostilities. Section 2, which Jim Henley quotes, is merely hortatory -- it expresses Congress's view of when the President can act unilaterally as a matter of constitutional authority. It does not itself impose any limitations. (And as Dellinger pointed out, *everyone* agrees that section 2 is inadequate as a descriptive matter, although there's a lot of dispute about how far the President's constitutional powers extend.)
2. The War Powers Resolution does require the President to get congressional approval if hostilities last beyond 90 days. The OLC Opinion that Matt links concluded (controversially) that appropriations statutes for Kosovo provided the requisite congressional approval for going beyond 90 days there. A similar question would arise if an Iranian conflict goes beyond 90 days; but we're not there yet, obviously.
3. The big question here is not the War Powers Resolution, but the Constitution. What sorts of hostilities can the President initiate unilaterally under the Constitution? Matt is right that the Clinton Administration took a very broad view -- see Haiti, Bosnia Bosnia and Kosovo, for starters; we basically concluded that congressional pre-approval is only required for a complete, or total, war (see footnote 5 of the Bosnia opinion, hinting that the Korean War might have been unlawful because Congress had not authorized it in advance).
The Bush Administration view is broader than that, if that's possible. There is no doubt Bush believes he has the authority to initiate all-out war with Iran, although of course the initial forays will be more limited than that (e.g., "surgical" strikes) -- which even the Clinton Administration would have viewed as constitutionally permissible.
So as a *practical* matter, the issue is determined -- the President believes he has the power, and he won't hesitate to exercise it.
Unless.
Unless Congress actually passes a statute, probably over Bush's signature, that would *prohibit* military action against Iran. Bush might go ahead anyway, in the teeth of such a statute, because in this respect his views of executive authority go way beyond Clinton's. But that truly would be an unprecdented constitutional showdown.
And it, too, is hypothetical, because Congress won't enact such a statute.
Therefore, what's most interesting about this whole incident is Hillary Clinton taking a narrower view of presidential authority than Bill did as President -- that *any* use of force against Iran requires congressional approval! Frankly, I'm surprised she has expressed such a view. Be interesting to see how Edwards and Obama respond.
Clearly, as long as George W. Bush is president, I think presidential war powers, like presidential powers in all respects, should be as sharply limited as possible. On the actual merits of the issue, I'm not really sure how I think the congress-president balance in such matters should go. As a general matter, I tend to think parliamentary systems as seen in Britain or Canada are superior to our method of government. A system like that puts less formal restraint on the head of government in terms of his ability to act, but also makes it much easier to dump a head of government whose policies have failed and whose leadership is widely considered inept.
Abstinence-only sex ed strikes again in disgusting ways, forcing schoolchidren to share pieces of gum. Aside from being a gross classroom activity, abstinence-only sex ed's record of increasing STD infection rates is, of course, a serious flaw.
Here's a portion of an email that went out from Rand Beers:
Military action against Iran is unwise
There is widespread agreement that although some within the administration may be pushing for war, a strike on Iran would run significantly counter to U.S. interests in the current environment. Military action would spark even greater anti-US violence in Iraq. Iran might also escalate violence in the wider region and attack American targets using its own agents or Hezbollah. There would almost certainly be a negative public reaction from the Islamic world, and that reaction would circumscribe the ability of Arab governments to work with us on issues of common interest such as Iraq or the Middle East peace process. Further, we cannot guarantee that an air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would effectively set back the nuclear program. Based on the current state of that program, even a successful military operation sustained over many days might only set back the program by as little as two to four years.
Tough, no-nonsense diplomacy with Iran is working
This administration’s choices have often been more about posturing and rhetoric than effective engagement. Sadly, these actions are also inadvertently or consciously escalatory, possibly pushing America down a path toward a conflict that we neither want nor need. Following Ahmedinejad’s humiliating defeat in the Iranian elections in December, he was ferociously attacked (including in newspapers associated with Supreme Leader Khamenei) for having brought down sanctions on Iran. There is now a vigorous debate in Tehran over whether Iran’s nuclear program is worth the risk of additional international opprobrium. The diplomatic “carrots and sticks” seem to be working. Unfortunately, the administration’s ham-handed military posturing and rhetoric risk torpedoing these efforts and offering Ahmedinejad a reprieve. We should be fostering this debate with a mix of sanctions and diplomacy, not undermining it.
Beers, we'll recall, has worked on the National Security Council under presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Nevertheless, Ken Baer keeps assuring me that there are no experts out there who think airstrikes should be off the table.
I wish I could tell you that it is impossible, but I don’t think it is. I think a war with Iran would be very messy and would cost us a lot more than we would gain. While many members of the Administration agree with that, others do not, and some seem willing to risk it to accomplish other goals. I am very concerned both by the President’s military moves toward Iran (like moving a second aircraft carrier and Patriot anti-missile batteries to the Persian Gulf, and ordering the U.S. military to use “all necessary means” to shut down Iranian activities in Iraq) and his unnecessarily threatening rhetoric toward them. Some degree of quiet pressure on Iran to stop their more damaging operations in Iraq could be useful, and the Iranians probably would back down under those circumstances; but the President’s policy risks engaging Iran’s nationalist pride, its strategic interests, and its real fear of the United States.
For those just joining us, the point at issue here is Kenneth Baer's assertion that "The reason why Obama, Clinton, and Edwards are all refusing to take the military option off the table is because there is no credible expert on Iran, nonproliferation, or any combination of the two who would advise them to do so." Nevertheless, many experts -- Pollack, Rand Beers, Joseph Cirincione, Ray Takeyh, Vali Nasr, etc. -- seem to me to feel that military strikes would be counterproductive and that threatening them is useless at best, harmful at worst.
Issues with Democrats aside, the goofball incoherence of Rudy Giuliani on the key national security issues of the day is worth noting:
Mr. King asked if Mr. Giuliani would agree that the Senate would have voted unanimously against the war if it were known that Mr. Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.
“Yes, I guess,” he said, but he added that such a vote would say nothing about whether the war was right.
Giuliani says he thinks the war was right (obviously, he has a low opinion of Republican Senators) but that if he'd been president he would have invaded with "maybe 100,000 to 130,000 more" troops than Bush deployed even though no such volume of additional troops was available. "Of course there were mistakes," according to Giuliani, which merely proves what a great man Bush is: "Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes."
One quirk of American politics is that leading presidential candidates normally go into the campaign with little if any foreign policy experience. Most, however, at least recognize this as a problem and try to study up as part of the campaign effort. Giuliani comes to us as a rare duck -- a candidate whose signature issue is national security but who doesn't know anything about national security, and therefore won't study. Result: Nonsense, combined with temperamental authoritarianism.
Laugh if you want, but Etan Thomas' -- and many analysts' -- favorite punching bag, has the team's best plus-minus ratio and the Wizards are 10-2 when he starts.
Really? The only source of plus-minus I know of is 82 Games.com which has the Wizards' plus-minus leader as Gilbert Arenas. Just as you would think, after Arenas comes Caron Butler and after Butler comes Antawn Jamison. Haywood comes after Jamison.
“In hundreds of conversations I’ve had with Iranian intellectuals, journalists, and human rights activists in recent years, I invariably encounter exasperation,” writes Danny Postel in Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, a recent addition to the Prickly Paradigm pamphlet series distributed by the University of Chicago Press. “Why, they ask, is the American Left so indifferent to the struggle taking place in Iran? Why can’t the Iranian movement get the attention of so-called progressives and solidarity activists here? Why is it mainly neoconservatives who express interest in the Iranian struggle?”
Obviously, most Americans simply don't take a ton of interest in events abroad at all, which is a fairly unfortunate trend. Among those people who do take such interest, there's simply no sign of indifference on the left to conditions in Iran. See, for example, Human Rights Watch's Iran page. Or Amnesty International's Iran page. The AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center does stuff on Iran. So does the Feminist Majority Foundation. In short, roughly every organization on the left that you would expect to deal with human rights conditions in Iran does, in fact, speak out on Iranian human rights issues and try to improve them.
Here on this blog and others we're also seeking to prevent a war with Iran that, as Garance Franke-Ruta points out, will, among other things, have the consequence of crushing the Iranian reform movement. Maybe I can write the "why are liberals such apologists for North Korea?" version of this book -- I don't have evidence to back my claims up, but, hey, who needs evidence?
And, yes, obviously if Iran decides to bomb American nuclear facilities (or something) then fighting back should be on that table. It is worth noting that if Iranian agents blew up American nuclear facilities that we would presumably (and not wrongly) consider that to be a serious act of terrorism, as well as a legitimate casus belli.
According to the Pew Center's typology test I'm . . . a liberal. You're shocked, I know. Lets learn more about us:
Basic Description This group has nearly doubled in proportion since 1999, Liberals now comprise the largest share of Democrats and is the single largest of the nine Typology groups. They are the most opposed to an assertive foreign policy, the most secular, and take the most liberal views on social issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and censorship. They differ from other Democratic groups in that they are strongly pro-environment and pro-immigration, issues which are more controversial among Conservative and Disadvantaged Democrats.
Defining Values Strongest preference for diplomacy over use of military force. Pro-choice, supportive of gay marriage and strongly favor environmental protection. Low participation in religious activities. Most sympathetic of any group to immigrants as well as labor unions, and most opposed to the anti-terrorism Patriot Act.
Who They Are Most (62%) identify themselves as liberal. Predominantly white (83%), most highly educated group (49% have a college degree or more), and youngest group after Bystanders. Least religious group in typology: 43% report they seldom or never attend religious services; nearly a quarter (22%) are seculars. More than one-third never married (36%). Largest group residing in urban areas (42%) and in the western half the country (34%). Wealthiest Democratic group (41% earn at least $75,000).
Over the long run, the growth in the number of liberals is, I think, a good thing. At the moment, however, it's a bit of a problem as both l'affaire Marcotte and some of Atrios' recent writings on religion indicate. As long as secular people were a profoundly small group of Americans divided fairly arbitrarily between the parties, seculars were happy to stay quiet and accept the very marginal role American politics assigns to the view that there is no God. Once you see us emerge as a large and politically coherent block, however, we want respect, damnit. Nevertheless, America's Christian majority -- including a vast swathe of Democrats -- don't want to hear about how you think their religion is silly.
This, I think, is a lot of the appeal of someone like Barack Obama. He has a lot of the personal and biographical attributes of your typical liberal (in the Pew sense) but he's also black, religious, etc. -- a combo-Democrat.
Azar Nafisi: "In other words, the main beneficiary of an attack on Iran would be the most militaristic and reactionary elements in the Iranian ruling hierarchy." I'm afraid I don't entirely understand the counterproposal:
The most effective war against the tyrants in Iran is through giving voice to the workers asking for their rights, to women fighting for equality and to students, journalists, writers and intellectuals fighting for freedom of expression.
To miss this opportunity not only would be disastrous for the Iranian people, it would have dire consequences for the United States and the world.
I'm all for it, I think, but what would it mean in practice? It seems to me that America's practical ability to impact this situation gets overstated.
After a baffling interaction with Pizza Hut, which first insisted its website wasn't working even though it clearly was, and then insisted that our house was outside its delivery radius even though it's four blocks away, we turned out attention to Papa John's whose website was advertising "Caron's 3 Point Play: One Large Three Topping, Breadsticks and a 2-Liter" for $18.99 -- what hungry Wizards fan could resist? Not me. It turns out, though, that you don't really get three toppings. You get one topping on the whole pizza, one topping on one half of the pizza, and one topping on the other half. And it doesn't really cost $18.99, either. Once you add in the delivery charge and taxes, it comes to $22.54. They also asserted that $1 was going to go to Butler's charity 3D. After discovering what a liar Butler turned out to be, naturally I had to look into that alleged charity. It turns out ot be legit, but their website reveals Butler's given name to be "James". Basically, everything about the man and his pizza deals is a sham. Except, of course, for his game.
In other Wizards blog news, contrary to Dave Berri's pre-emptive attack, I agree with him about Antawn Jamison. The Wizards stink without him less because he's a great player than simply because he's a good player with awful backup. I do, however, sort of disagree with the "overrated" characterization just because I don't think there's actually much disagreement about this. The Wages of Wins "overrated" list seems to me to be based not only on a debatable model of quality, but on a clearly flawed model of ratedness.
Ah, good times. New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz has dispatched his assistant, James Kirchik, to attack me in what I believe is Washington, DC's second most-popular free daily, The Examiner: "Matthew Yglesias, the insufferable enfant terrible of the liberal blogosphere, frequently refers to the 'Lobby that Shall Not be Named,' which supposedly suppresses any critique of the Jewish state . . . When prodded to identify an instance in which legitimate criticism of Israel has been labeled 'anti-Semitic,' the promoters of this meme come up with nothing."
The joke is "The Lobby that Must Not be Named" like in Harry Potter, see? At any rate, Kirchik has a promising future in conservative journalism, having mastered the time-honored techniques of rising through the ranks without any demonstrated ability in fields other than arguing with straw men and making things up about his opponents. Apparently, he's already a bi-weekly Examiner columnist, and I know I always look forward to his pearls of wisdom on the Plank.
UPDATE: It occurs to me to point out that I have no actual reason to believe Peretz sicced his assistant on me and I shouldn't have said that he did.
You don't seem to be able to buy salt to keep your sidewalks ice- and snow-free anywhere in Washington, DC these past couple of days since more prepared people snapped it all up. That, in turn, laid the groundwork for my discovery that many people don't seem to realize that ordinary table salt can perform the snow-melting function just fine. I assume the ice marketing specifically for snow-related purposes is chemically different in some respect from the table stuff, but not the relevant one.
Saltwater has a lower freezing point than does unmixed water. Indeed, the idea of the farenheit temperature scale is that zero degrees is supposed to be the freezing point of an equal mixture of salt and water (100 degrees is supposed to be human body temperature, but it got miscalculated) so the salt effect can be quite substantial if you have enough of it.
UPDATE: Yes, as they're saying in comments, rock salt is considerably cheaper. I'm just saying that if all the stores in your area run out of rock salt, and you want to melt some ice, table salt will work.
You've probably noticed that McClatchey Newspapers, the artists formerly known as Knight-Ridder, have been doing national security reporting that, despite some very fine efforts by contenders at the prestige papers, tends to make the competition look embarassingly bad by comparison for years now. Well, via Jim Henley here comes an eye-opening blog they've set up by the Iraqi journalists working for the McClatchey Baghdad bureau:
I was called from home to be told that a nephew of mine was killed in the explosion in the city center. The explosion went off in a central, much frequented market, so there was no doubt it was targeting civilians. Then they called me to say it may not be him after all because there was no way to identify what was left ... only his cell phone in the pants' pocket.
Now I'm waiting, fearfuly, for confirmation either way.
The problem doesn't end there.
If it isn't him, it's someone's son anyway. But if it is him ... whom are we willing to risk going to the Morgue to receive the remains?? If and when we receive him ... where do we burry him?? Almost none who take the path to Abu Ghraib Cemetary return unscathed.
First off, congratulations to the DCist crew on another successful "Unbuckled" live music experience. That said, Catherine remarks "some of my respectable roommates loathed Pela, but i liked their sound and thought they put on an excellent show." I liked their sound, too, when it was from a band called every other band to emerge from Brooklyn this century. And I mean it. I did like their sound. Normally, it's a little bit difficult to get into a live show by a band you've never heard before, simply because it's kind of more fun to rock out to familiar tunes. Pela wasn't like that at all, all their songs kind of felt like I'd heard them before. And, indeed, I sort of had. They've accomplished a genuinely impressive feat in terms of accomplishing genericness.
At the end of the day, though, the best song in their set was a cover of the Pixies' "The Holiday Song" and that should tell you something. Their efforts to locate the Platonic Ideal of the indie rock song were worthy, but ultimately they're better off stealing than imitating.
I take it back; James Kirchik has a lot to learn. Jonah Goldberg explains how an absence of high-level Iranian government complicity in the alleged giving of weapons to anti-American groups in Iraq would strengthen the case for aggressive action against Iran.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal editorial page, New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz bashes the "Democrat Party" and also gives us his view of the Iraqi scene:
I think the odds against us are huge. One reason is that Iraq is neither a state that coheres nor a society that coheres. Its civil society, if that is what it is, is not quite a civilized society. The carnage between Shia and Sunni, and the carnage among other religious and ethnic communions, since the end of Ottoman rule have left deep and bloodied breaches in Iraq.
I agree with some of this, in particular that Iraq is neither a state nor a society that coheres. That said, it's hard not to notice that Peretz keeps claiming in his various writings that Iraqis are uncivilized (recall, e.g., the "rudiments of civilization" incident). Any conclusions to be drawn from this will be left to the reader.
So . . . Bill Richardson's presidential campaign is way too not major for him to afford the best speechwriters, but unlike the other candidates he has some practical experience conducting diplpmacy. He's managed to come up with this petition that doesn't involve dropping an "all options are on the table" chest-pounding note into the mix:
I join many progressive critics in the belief that balanced budget monomania at times goes to far in left-of-center circles. That said, James Galbraith seems backwards here:
But these advances come at a price, which will be exacted in two areas: the world trading system and domestic fiscal policy. Both of these are far more fundamental to the Hamilton mission than any particular social policy reform. Indeed, one purpose of the Hamilton Project, it seems clear, is to propose just enough creative social advances--such as wage insurance, better teacher pay and healthcare reform--so as to divert discussion from the bedrock commitments to free trade and a balanced budget.
Progressives shouldn't let this happen.
This seems to imply that progressives ought to have a bedrock commitment to an imbalanced budget; that when the Hamilton Project dangles the tempting candy of creative social advances in favor of the higher good of deficits. What I think we should say is that we shouldn't allow our bedrock commitment to creative social advances be compromised by fanatical pursuit of fiscal discipline. At the same time, we should be willing to accept concessions and declare victory. If the Hamilton Project wants to roll out a good wage insurance proposals, let's go get a wage insurance program implemented. After all, the budget is already non-balanced; keeping it that way isn't much of a policy agenda.
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, says Rudy Giuliani is doomed and offers various negative thoughts about several other of the major GOP contenders. The inability of the Republican Party to find itself any high-profile potential presidential candidates whose efforts to portray themselves as social conservatives aren't so transparently bogus is a bit bizarre, as is the press' odd inattention to the sorry state of the GOP field.
I understand that two wrongs don't make a right, etc., but I wonder if the Dan Gersteins of the world, so concerned about incivility and immaturity among left-wing bloggers, worry at all about the influence of, say, Don Young over the Republican Party:
Young, as you'll recall, is an actual member of congress -- more influential than even Kos! And he's making quotes up! And calling for the murder of Democratic members of congress!
The former All-Star, as you may have heard, reacted to the news that John Amaechi is gay by saying "You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States." David Stern reprimanded him for being a bigoted ass. The Concerned Women of America, meanwhile, reprimanded Hardaway for setting back the cause of legal and social discrimination against gays and lesbians.
There have been a spate of bombings inside Iran recently, mostly in the parts of the country near Afghanistan where it hasn't been unheard of for groups in the general ideological neighborhood of the Taliban and al-Qaeda to mounts attacks of one sort or another. The Iranians, possibly in an effort to be cute, are claiming the bombs were made in the USA, proving, at a minimum, that two can play at this game. What it reallly ought to do, however, is serve as a reminder that the US and Iran ought to be working together against common foes rather than stumbling into a new destructive war.
Laura Sessions Stepp, The Washington Post's most annoying lifestyle reporter, has a new book out about the evils of hooking up. "Your body is your property," she warns girls, "Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?" Hilarity ensues.
But of course we get this kind of thing rather frequently in our public policy, thanks to pro-abstinence politicians like John McCain. I understand that it's difficult for politicians to stand up against this kind of thing even though it's stupid -- nobody wants to run as the candidate telling voters' teenage kids they should have sex. But Atrios is right that politicians who want to foist this kind of thing on the public ought to get asked the question: Did McCain save it for his first marriage?
With the Employee Free Choice Act gaining some legislative steam and Dick Cheney promising business that Bush has their back on this issue, it's natural that the anti-union talking points are getting out there. Kevin Drum does a nice job with this ditty in the LA Times, but the assertion that "the sad irony of unions is that they can only improve the lot of their members at the expense of other workers."
One tends to see a lot of this sort of thing from people overinvested in their formal economic models. It's worth wonders why owners and managers are willing to invest so much in keeping it easy to deny workers their ability to organize and bargain collectively if this is the case. All just some giant screw-up, or is it possible that corporate managers are perfectly aware that their share of the overall economic pie is partially on the table in these disputes? Or are we supposed to believe that the Chamber of Commerce is acting out of deep concern for low-skilled workers rather than the managers whose interests it represents?
Regardless of what was real and what was imagined about the Celtics, the NBA happily pushed the same plotline for the team: the Celts were the guardians of old-school team basketball. In an NBA-produced segment summarizing the Celtics' 1987 first-round playoff series with the Bulls, which aired during game 5 of the Celts' second-round matchup with the Pistons, the NBA highlighted the (implied) racial difference between a legitimate team--the Celtics--and a one-man show--the Bulls. The narrator of the segment billed the series "a classic battle: the athlete against the team," in which the athlete (Michael Jordan), through spectacular individual play, managed to leave his mark on "the fabled parquet floor" of the Boston Garden but failed to oust the hometown Celts. Ultimately, the "Celtic tradition … and … old Celtic magic" proved too much for one person to overcome, and "while the athlete got his record [scoring an unprecedented 63 points in a single playoff game], the team got its win."
This, I think, is mostly true. On the other hand, the timing for proclaiming Bird the "last" white superstar seems pretty bad as we actually have several white stars nowadays. The proviso one has to make is that Bird is the last white American superstar, and it's certainly true that considerations of nationality put Bird in a different context than, say, Dirk Nowitzki, who's pretty aggressively German. Steve Nash, however, while not in fact an American still doesn't have any "foreign" qualities that would make him difficult for your typical white American fan to identify with. Nevertheless, I think you did see a palpable yearning for more white stars evident in people's willingness to suspend disbelief and convince themselves that Adam Morrison was going to be an NBA star and J.J. Reddick was worth a lottery pick.
Nash arguably plays with too much flash to be the vindication of white hoop dreams. David Lee, fresh from dominating the Rookie Challenge and conveniently located in the media supercapital of New York City seems well-positioned. He's a "hard-working" player who does the "little things" -- he's even undersized at the four. It's somewhat striking that, as best I can tell, he's actually a somewhat underrated player.
UPDATE: It's also worth noting in this context that the black Tracy McGrady is starting in the All-Star Game over Nash thanks to the voting strength of the Houston Rockets' large following among Chinese fans.
No one but Romney can know how his beliefs might affect his judgment. Instead of focusing on his faith," writes Stephen Stromberg in The Washington Post, "it would be much more worthwhile for voters to judge Mitt Romney on his evolving political agenda -- as Republicans did when George Romney ran in 1967." Well, to be sure, people should judge Romney primarily on his "evolving" political agenda. Part of his "evolving" political agenda, however, regards his late-in-life conversion to a certain set of views about, in his press secretary's words, "the sanctity of life." Romney, at the time a pro-choice Mormon, first garnered attention from traditionalist Christians when he took a stand in defense of what many Christian traditionalists, including the president of the United States, defined as "the sanctity of marriage".
It's difficult to erect a sharp dichotomy between an "evolving" political agenda and matters of religious faith, when so much of Romney's political "evolution" regards his views on the sanctity of this or that. Obviously, one shouldn't neglect Romney's health care agenda or whatever he may have to say about world affairs, but he's clearly trying to reconnect with orthodox Mormon political views in an effort to increase his appeal to traditionalist Christian voters, so it's hardly crazy to think this has some relevance. Stromberg asks us to "Consider the divergent examples of other well-known Mormons -- those of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), say." But while Hatch and Reid certainly do have divergent views on a variety of political topics, their views on the sanctity of life -- against legal abortion, for federal funding of stem cell research -- are very similar and seemingly based in part on Mormon theology so, again, it's perfectly reasonable for traditionalist Christian voters concerned about these issues to interest themselves in Romney's Mormonism.
I have to say that I wonder whether the Clinton campaign really wants to go there. The polls indicate that being a woman is a smaller electoral handicap than being a Mormon (Romey), 72 years-old (McCain), or on a third marriage (Giuliani), but a larger one than being an African-American. It would be unfortunate for the party to get bogged down in an ugly dispute over this, and I hope the issue will drop, but it makes a lot more sense as something for John Edwards' camp to raise.
It seems to me that as of one day before Election Day 2006, progressives had a solid grasp of what good things would flow from winning congressional majorities. In brief:
No more domestic agenda for George W. Bush.
Oversight hearings.
Control of the agenda to rame issues in ways favorable to the Democrats for 2008.
Sometime in December, however, people seem to have gotten it into their head that something else would happen. That narrow congressional majorities were actually going to seize control of American national security policy in the face of determined opposition from the President of the United States supported nearly uniformly by his copartisans in congress. Thus, Matt Stoller includes on his list of "groups and individuals" who are "blocking real progress on Iraq," "Harry Reid, who failed to get a vote on a non-binding resolution in the Senate, and doesn't think his original war vote was wrong. It's Bush's fault apparently that Reid voted for the war. Like with his stance on Alito, Reid is giving the impression of action, but not the teeth."
Well, no. Look, Matt Yglesias leading a caucus of 51 Democratic Senators that includes Joe Lieberman, Bill Nelson, and Tim Johnson couldn't get much done in these circumstances either. Nor could Matt Stoller. It's not Reid's fault that there aren't 60 votes for a non-binding resolution on Iraq in the Senate (except in the sense that the "nuclear option" fight was mishandled way back in the day, and Democrats should have tried to abolish filibusters altogether). Blame Lieberman. Blame Jeff Sessions. And, again, ask yourself: If Reid's resolution is so useless, why is the GOP so determined to defeat it? And if it's so difficult to get 60 votes for this measure, what would the point be in proposing something more far-reaching that would only fail by a larger margin? The sad reality is that what Matt and I would like to see the Democrats accomplish is, under the circumstances, very difficult to achieve. Progressives should keep the pressure on for action, but we need to understand that objective circumstances matter. This is a slow boring of hard boards kind of situation, and it's extremely frustrating, but it's also George W. Bush's fault, not Reid's.
As you may have read in Jamie Kirchick's column, it's never the case that Israel's critics get smeared as anti-semites. Or, as Kirchick's boss, New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz put it, either "Carter is actually batty" or else "he is animated by a very strong animus towards Jews."
Here on the CDC's website you can read about dracunculiasis, Guinea Worm Disease, an ailment found in Africa where contaminated water leads to worm larvae getting inside your body. "During the next 10-14 months, the female Guinea worm grows to a full size adult 60-100 centimeters (2-3 feet) long and as wide as a cooked spaghetti noodle," at which point "a blister develops on the skin at the site where the worm will emerge" that "causes a very painful burning sensation." After a day or two, it ruptures and the worm emerges after which time you "may be unable to work or resume daily activities for an average of 3 months." What's more, "Almost invariably the skin lesions caused by the worm develop secondary bacterial infections, which exacerbate the pain, and extend the period of incapacitation to weeks or months-causing in some cases disabling complications, such as locked joints and even permanent crippling."
The good news, is that, as Nicholas Kristof reports, "because of [Jimmy] Carter’s two-decade battle against Guinea worm disease, it is expected to be eradicated worldwide within the next five years. It will be the first ailment to be eliminated since smallpox in 1977." The point is that there's a real cost to these smear campaigns. Carter does many good works around the world through his leadership of the Carter Center. Obviously, though, if the idea gets out there that Carter is motivated by hatred of Jews, then people aren't going to want to be associated with Carter or the Carter Center which would be a very bad thing for, for examples, victims of horrifying parasite infections.
The view that only a "person of faith" is qualified to serve in high political office that I don't know if there's any point in criticizing Mitt Romey for expressing it. I recall when Joe Lieberman was running on the ticket with Al Gore and said all atheists are immoral . It seems pretty clear that political consultants think the smart play for non-Christian candidates is to try and whip up anti-atheist sentiment to bridge the gap. This is why Romney's going to wind up getting a lot of odd questions about the details of his approach to Mormonism.
Christian candidates usually just let the whole issue go unsaid, trusting in the occassional "God Bless America" to express solidarity with Christian sentiment in the electorate. The Romney/Lieberman approach, however, requires the non-Christian candidate to explicitly cite the fact of his deep religious faith as a qualification for office. In Lieberman's case, he had the advantage of his deep faith being more obviously sincere than in Romney's case and the fact that though Judaism denies the truth of Christianity it doesn't try to replace it in the way that Mormonism does.
Not working, obviously: "Two car bombs exploded in an outdoor market in Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 56 people and injuring scores in the deadliest attack since U.S. and Iraqi forces began a major security push around the capital last week." Note that this, like the vast majority of bombing attacks, came in a Shiite neighborhood (as did a less deadly attack in Sadr City) which raises the question of why driving Muqtada al-Sadr temporarily out of the country and screaming about Iranian support of Shiite militias is supposed to help stabilize Iraq.
"Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today," reports the Associated Press, "claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers." Mickey Kaus approves and says he wishes Barack Obama had talked about getting "rid of people" rather than offering a vaguer call for "accountability."
This sounds commonsensical, but my understanding is that the reason politicians rarely push for it is that the actual payoff is very, very low. The issue is that there isn't this vast pool of highly effective potential hires out there. The schools with serious teacher-quality problems tend to have them because the better teachers, by and large, don't want to work there and schools have problems filling all the slots with minimally qualified people. The real action (also disliked by teacher unions, if pissing off unions is your goal) is in the certification process, who counts as a qualified teacher, and what counts as an effective teacher (here's where the accountability comes in). If in the future that created a situation where there were tons of people looking to break into the teaching field then it might make sense to expend political capital on making it easier to fire people.
This is pretty sweet. Stephen H. Miller on the Independent Gay Forum denounces the Human Rights Campaign for refusing to endorse Rudy Giuliani in the GOP primary even though . . . they haven't actually done that. He's just so sure they will that he's decided to issue a pre-emptive denunciation.
The real issue is whether the Giuliani camp would even want HRC's endorsement. Presumably, he's going to spend the next year running as far away from his pro-gay record as possible, which would probably preclude seriously courting the leadership of a major gay rights organization or endorsing their legislative agenda.
t is hard to explain to a younger generation that such delightful countries as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Poland and Czechoslovakia (to name only a few) were run in those days by fascist generals, avowed racists or one-party totalitarian regimes. I am ancient enough to remember the long list of countries I would not visit for summer holidays; old enough to recall how creepy it was to enter Walter Ulbricht's East German prison house of a state via Checkpoint Charlie in the late 1960s. Ugh.
This matters, because I think people sometimes underestimate exactly how horrible it would be in humanitarian terms to return to Cold War-style conditions of global competition between the United States and some other power (presumably China ). People often -- and correctly -- see that the UN Security Council process is often going to be an impediment to certain kinds of humanitarian military ventures and want to just let it all drop. And it's true that this sort of thing can be frustrating. Ultimately, however, a world where the major powers have cordial, mostly cooperative relations with one another is a much, much better world to live in.
I've been beating this drum for a long time, but let me recommend Jonathan Chait's column on Rudy Giuliani's alleged national security expertise, which apparently consists of his ability to act like a tough guy:
f having a macho swagger and talking tough about bad guys were enough to make a good commander in chief, we wouldn't have the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history on our hands right now in Iraq. And, need I remind anybody, one of the reasons Giuliani hasn't been able to fulfill his Bin Laden execution fantasy is that Bush allowed the Al Qaeda leader to escape at Tora Bora by using Afghan proxies instead of U.S. ground troops.
As I noted in this space last week, conservative foreign policy consists increasingly of abstract notions divorced from reality. In preparing for last week's House debate over the Iraq troop surge, the Republican leadership instructed its members in a memo: "The debate should not be about the surge or its details. This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily. If we let Democrats force us into a debate on the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose."
Right. Republican national security policy looks great, except when they need to discuss their actual policies, the results of such policies, the likely consequences of continuing the policies, etc. Giuliani fits perfectly into the mold.
Everyone is quoting this example of Bush getting naughty:
Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon's delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: "I will screw him in the ass!"
To try and make a novel point about this, why wouldn't Bush say he wants to "fuck" OBL in the ass? It strikes me as strange to get fastidious about the terminology used to express the rape fantasy as long as you're going to express the fantasy. I had a similar thought yesterday's watching Cradle 2 The Grave (truly the poor man's Romeo Must Die) on TNT where it was okay to show giant gun battles, a woman performing a striptease to distract a guy while her colleagues break into his office, etc., but everyone had to say "freak" instead of "fuck." What does this accomplish? Meanwhile, there were an awful lot of ads for K-Y Jelly running during commercial breaks which seem much more likely to me to generate a situation that will make parents uncomfortable ("daddy, what's a lubricant for?") than would the occassional dirty word.
Speaking in South Carolina, Hillary Clinton expresses the oft-heard view that "I believe one of the great things about America is, anyone can be president, and what it depends upon is the individual."
If only it were true!
People constantly seem to be forgetting about this, but the foreign-born are systematically excluded from the presidency for no real reason. Like a kid who immigrated to this country from Mexico at the age of two is seriously at risk of disloyalty, or we're all haunted by a deep, dark suspicion that Madeleine Albright may be a sleeper agent run by Czech intelligence. Thus, the popular moderate Republican governor of the country's largest state isn't considered a potential contender in 2008 and won't be a contender in 2012, either, because he was born in Austria.
Hillary Clinton: "Some people may be running who may tell you that we don't face a real threat from terrorism. I am not one of those." That comes to us via Matt Stoller who, quite rightly, would like to hear Clinton explain who she means.
Meanwhile, I'd also like to hear someone in the press corps ask George W. Bush when, exactly, he made the determination that Iran is a more serious threat to American interests than is al-Qaeda and why he did so. This is the sort of issue we ought to have out in the open.
UPDATE: A colleague notes that John Kerry has said terrorism isn't as big a threat as many people think, and (ironically) Bill Clinton has said global warming is worse than terrorism. The difference between "the threat of X has been overblown" and "the threat of X is not real" will be left as an exercize for the reader.
J-Pod thinks it's obviously absurd to worry that American democracy will collapse and the country will adopt an authoritarian mode of government. Meanwhile, his colleague Mark Steyn explains that though he doesn't approve of fascism, he thinks Europe will probably turn fascist soon in response to the onrushing Muslim Hordes: "Indeed, Ralph Peters and I have already argued about this: the difference between us, as I explain here, is that I think any descent into neo-Fascism will be ineffectual and therefore merely a temporary blip in the remorseless transformation of the Continent."
My take: You really never know what will happen. It is, however, striking that the contemporary right has widely committed itself to the view that (a) presidential war powers during an undeclared, semi-permament war are essentially without limit, (b) political efforts aimed at curtailing and rolling back presidential war policy are essentially treasonous (see, e.g., Don Young's remarks about hanging members of congress), and (c) media reports that serve to undermine the popularity of presidential war policy are, similarly, treasonous. To discern the significance of all this in historical terms, I would need to know more about the history of the right-wing popular press. It's worth noting that as recently as the 1960s, African-Americans certainly wouldn't view the notion of an authoritarian form of government as outlandish.
If The New York Times says a Sirius-XM merger is "sure to raise antitrust issues" then I'm happy to believe them. I have a hard time seeing a serious issue here, however. As is typical in these cases, the relevant think is the definition of the market. If you think there's a discrete "satellite radio" market then, yes, a combined Sirius-XM entity would clearly have monopoly power in that market. Realistically, though, the product both Sirius and XM are selling -- audio broadcasts -- is one for which there's a great deal of competition. Cable and satellite television providers are capable of delivering similar content, though in not as convenient-to-use a manner. People can listen to CDs, buy internet music subcription services, subscribe to "podcasts," and, of course, satellite radio needs to compete with its freely available terrestrial radio counterpart.
After all, at the moment I -- like most Americans -- don't have a satellite radio subscription even though I'm pretty gadget inclined. The logic of the business is that the merged entity needs to grow, which is to say continue trying to offer a deal that people find appealing compared to our many other entertainment options, not our satellite radio options.
As we see the anti-Ethiopian Islamist insurgency in Somalia continue to pick up steam, even prompting Ethiopian troops to deploy the legendarily successful counterinsurgency tactic of "return[ing] fire with artillery and heavy machine-gun fire throughout the night," can we ask once again what the United States policy in the Horn of Africa has accomplished. None of the terrorists allegedly being harbored by the Islamic Courts Movement have been captured. The Ethiopians cannot (of course) effectively control the country. It seems that hundreds of Somali civilians have died in various kinds of fighting. And we've effectively opened up another branch campus of Jihad University.
Nicholas Kristof has more on Jimmy Carter's efforts to combat parasitic infections in Africa, including campaigns against river blindness (caused by a different worm from the one responsible for Guinea Disease), elephantitis and malaria, intestinal worms, etc. Then comes the policy point:
Mr. Carter’s private campaign against the diseases of poverty, put together with pennies and duct tape, is a model of what our government could do. Imagine if the U.S. resolved that it would wipe out malaria and elephantiasis (both are spread by mosquitoes, so a combined campaign makes sense). What if we celebrated science not by trying to go to Mars but by extinguishing malaria? What if we tried to burnish America’s image abroad not only with press releases and propaganda broadcasts, but also with a bold campaign against disease?
So I wish that President Bush could visit villages like this and see what Mr. Carter has accomplished as a private individual. Mr. Bush, to his great credit, has financed a major campaign against AIDS that will save nine million lives, and he is also increasing spending against malaria — but not nearly as energetically as he is increasing the number of troops in Iraq. So I asked Mr. Carter whether President Bush should be pushing not for a possible war with Iran, but for a war on malaria.
I would hardly bother to criticize Bush on this point. Compared to other aspects of his administration, Bush's "let's try to cure diseases in Africa" policy has been pretty good (as Kristof said, involving some meaningful increases in some areas). Obviously, he should do more, but we're talking about a really, really bad president so I don't expect anything better from him. But for the next administration and peoples' edification, these points are well worth considering. The marginal value of additional resources spent on these sorts of problems is pretty giant at this point, and it's a lot clearer in a technical sense how you would go about helping people through public health measures than how you would go about building democracy or spurring economic development.
Ogged fires back in defense of the theory that we should fear President Granholm selling us down the river to the Canadians:
Yglesias and his commenters seem to be of one mind that the exclusion of naturalized citizens from the presidency is self-evidently anachronistic. It's always seemed like a good idea to me. Nationalism is real, and even for immigrants like me, who have very few memories of the country of their birth, the old country retains a special tug, and you don't want a president with special feelings for any country other than the one he's elected to serve.
I don't think this will wash at all. We don't systematically exclude non-"natural born" citizens from any other government posting even though loyalty to the United States is presumably something you're looking for in a Secretary of State, a general, a National Security Advisor, etc. But more to the point, this is why we have elections. There are a lot of characteristics I consider generally undesirable in a president, but we don't constitutionally exclude people from office on the basis of anything other than birth nationality and age. What's more, for a range of possible countries to have affections for, would we actually care if the president had dual loyalties? What would the problem with an emotional attachment to Austria or Denmark be? And why would your birth nationality matter more for these purposes than the issue of where you were raised?
I continue to think the San Antonio Spurs are being oddly underestimated. Yes, yes, they're "only" at a .660 winning percentage. Yes, they're scheduled for the fourth seed behind Dallas, Phoenix, and Utah. Yes, it's even true that "With Yao, Houston could potentially bump San Antonio down to No. 3 in the All-Texas Standings, stunning as that sounds." That said, look at the point differentials. Dallas is 7.4, Phoenix and San Antonio are both 7.3, Houston is 5.6, is 2.9.
Obviously, that's a classic quant argument and I do expect sportswriters to ignore point differential in favor of crude W-L. The weird thing is that all the other sportswriterly considerations also point in favor of adopting a forgiving attitude toward San Antonio's record; this is a classic curmudgeon's team, full of Veteran Leadership, featuring an NBA Legend, a the Best Coach, the Defense, Robert Horry, etc. Plus, it's an odd numbered year which, on its own terms, overwhelmingly favors the Spurs. I'm not saying I'd take an even-odds bet that San Antonio will win it all (odds are they'll need to beat Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix to get to the Finals, which is, um, hard to do) but I don't understand writing them off, either. People remember the way the Suns ran away with the 2004-2005 regular season (Joe Johnson was the fourth guy on that team), right?
Like Mark Schmitt, I've been reading the Third Way's strategy paper on the economy, especially it's attack on the "myths of neopopulism," and like him I'm not totally thrilled with it. I continue, however, to have the same basic puzzlement as to why the "optimism versus pessimism" argument is thought to be so central to disputes and why the Third Way thinks it should be able to sell its policy agenda with so little discussion of, um, the policies.
It turns out that the cable I use to connect my digital camera to my computer can also be used to recharge my Razr by using it to connect the phone to my laptop. So if that works, then how come Canon doesn't make it so that the Camera battery can be recharged this way as well? When traveling, it's always nice to minimize the number of discreet power items you need to take with you and risk losing.
Realistically, I imagine I'll end up backing Barack Obama or John Edwards for president since you need to lend your support to someone who might win, but today's column wonders why Bill Richardson can't get no respect.
As in this article($) in today's Wall Street Journal, which tells the story of a husband and wife who found the perfect private school for their high schools daughters, a tony prep school near Boston. Unfortunately, they lived in Los Angeles. So, naturally, the husband quit his job, they sold their house, and they moved to small apartment in Boston. It took him three months to find a new job, so they had to run through most of their savings and the money they made on the home sale in order to live and pay the $56,000 school tuition. Their furniture is still in L.A., because they can't afford to move it, and the wife, who used to stay home, is now looking for work. But it was all worth it, because their daughters are learning Greek.
"I hope it was at least Winsor," I thought, before clicking the link to see that it was, indeed, Winsor, a piece of information that fortunately was available in the free preview section. Since I haven't read the whole thing, I don't know what was wrong with LA's own tony prep schools (I believe Harvard-Westlake is the one to go to), but it seems clear to me that if you live in California and want to send your kids to school in New England the thing to do is take advantage of the area's many fine boarding schools. Are there no Grotons? What price Milton?
When your chief executive becomes unpopular due to the catastrophic failure of his policymaking and leadership, it's always good to read that he's increasingly surrounding himself with an insular group of long-time loyalists: "Six years into Mr. Bush’s presidency, the corps of loyal Texans who accompanied him to Washington from Austin remains a powerful force inside the administration, a steady source of comfort for an increasingly isolated president." Good times. I found this part especially hilarious: "Mr. Johnson says the most painful accusation is hearing Mr. Bush called a liar."
For me, the most painful thing is the way Bush is constantly trying to mislead people.
Via Eve Fairbanks, here's hot video of Mitt Romney debating Shannon O'Brien in 2002 and elaborating on his strong pro-choice convictions:
For a bit of background here, let me just say that I was living in Massachusetts during this election, and when Romney said he supported a woman's right to choose I believed him. Watch the video, and I think you'll see that Romney is acting a little indignant. And, at the time, I thought rightly so. His opponent's camp tried now and again to insert the choice issue into the race even though Romney had a perfectly consistent pro-choice record going back to his 1994 campaign against Ted Kennedy. Why shouldn't he have been indignant? Well, the dude turns out to be a decent liar; though it's hard to say which position, if any, is the one he ever really believed in. You get the sense he'd say babies come from storks if he thought that was the way to advance his political career.
Dennis O'Neil, who has written actual Green Lantern stories, references my orginal Green Lantern Theory post and writes a bit about the politics of the character:
Green Lantern's proclivity for that ol' action wasn't my biggest problem with the character when I began writing monthly stories about him way, way back in the last century. We were just past the fabled Sixties, the era of peace and civil rights activism, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, love-ins, be-ins, the march on the Pentagon, the Chicago Seven...(You can add your own examples, or consult one of the remaining hippies; look for tie-dye and a grey ponytail.) The rebel-activists weren't right about everything, far from it, but I think they were right when they advised their contemporaries not to trust anyone over 30. Translation: be wary of authority figures. I don't know when you're reading this, but I'll bet your current newspaper has evidence that mistrusting authority figures is an excellent life strategy.
Which brings us to Green Lantern: here's this guy, a human living on Earth, who takes his orders from a bunch of high-and-mighty blue extraterrestrials and is expected to act on their commands without questioning them. We might assume him to be George Bush's idea of a hero, if we recall that Mr. Bush and cohorts discouraged questioning by keeping as much information as possible secret, and stage-managing what were supposed to be public events, but he isn't my idea of a hero and I hope he isn't yours. Our heroes, yours and mine, are warrior-philosophers, who make their own decisions, do their own thinking and question the hell out of everything.
My tendency is to look at the Guardians as a kind of awesome interstellar United Nations. It's true, however, that they aren't actually an interplanetary organization in the way that the UN is an international organization. Nobody's represented in the decision-making process except the Guardians themselves who have no source of legitimacy except their own sense of rectitude and their practical power. The Guardians, in a sense, are like a "benevolent hegemony" vision of the American hyperpower.
Stop Iran War.com, from Wesley Clark and Vote Vets.org, "a one-stop resource for all Americans to help stop the looming conflict with Iran." Fellow monomaniacs should enjoy it.
"We Marines," writes Mackubin Thomas Owens on The Corner, "maintain that except for Lee Harvey Oswald, there is no such thing as an 'ex-Marine.' I believe that John Murtha has just joined that small club."
It's really striking how casual mainstream elements of the right have become about tossing off accusations of treason about Democratic Party members of congress with whom they have policy disagreements. How long before some Jack Ruby decides that Rep. Don Young's musing about the desirability of killing congressional Democrats should be taken literally?
"Contrary to popular belief, international relations scholars are not doves," according to a new survey of IR scholars (Foreign Policy article here; full results here; hat-tip Daniel Drezner), "most believe that military force is warranted under the right conditions."
What do the others believe? That it's warranted under the wrong conditions? Unwarranted even when the conditions are right?
As Dan remarks, the really interesting result has to do with this bit of realist convergence with liberal thinking: "we found realists to be much more supportive of military intervention with a U.N. imprimatur than they are of action without such backing. Among realists, in fact, the gap between support for multilateral and unilateral intervention in North Korea is identical to the gap among scholars of the liberal tradition, whose theories explicitly favor cooperation." Dan Nexon comments, "I don't believe this is because realists have suddenly turned into Wilsonsians; rather, I suspect the data reflects how a broad cross-section of realist scholars have come to the conclusion that international legitimacy greases the wheels of power and makes counterbalancing less likely." I'm no professor, but it seems to me that reaching that conclusion substantially constitutes turning into a Wilsonian.
Conveniently enough, the Wizards played the Timberwolves the very week of the trade deadline, serving to drive home to the extent to which the basketball universe must demand a Garnett-to-Chicago trade. Garnett is a historic figure, not only one of the best players but literally an integral element of turn-of-the-century Association history; the prime mover in the death of positionality, the return of the high schooler and the subsequent Age Limit Era, the Contract Explosiion and subsequent max salary rule, etc. A guy like that deserves to be on a good team, one that pushes into the playoffs and (who knows?) could play for it all. As of now, all we have was the 2003-2004 run, and -- forgetting for a moment what Garnett deserves -- we deserve more. This is especially true given that there are a number of perfectly logical Minnesota-Chicago trade scenarios.
The other big name possibility is Jason Kidd going to the Los Angeles. Obviously, if the Lakers really do somehow manage to snag Kidd without giving up Odom or Bynum, they've got to pull the trigger on that, but as a fan, I don't really want to see it. For five season the Lakers were a delightful Evil Empire, the team I Loved to Hate. And, like many people, I found Kobe more loathsome than Shaq, and though the Lakers per se became less loathsome following the Shaq trade (how could you hate such a devastated squad) the Black Mamba became even more so. In the 2004-2005 season, however, Kobe voyaged to the underworld and appeared to re-emerge the stronger for it in his 2005-2006 campaign. Now, from the vantage point of this year, I actually believe Kobe might win another championship at some point. Not this spring, to be sure. But next year or the year after? If Bynum keeps developing? If everyone stays healthy? It would be . . . redemption. I'm not sure I could root for him, but (barring an Eastern Conference Championship for the Wizards, of course) I certainly couldn't root against him.
A return to contention through the deus ex machina of a one-sided trade for aging star Jason Kidd, however, is not the path of redemption. What makes the emerging Kobe Bryant story so unlikely is the way the Lakers dependence on development-from-within depends on precisely what we Kobe-haters never thought he could do -- become a leader, a teacher, a mentor -- and lucking into Kidd would rob what we're seeing of all its appealing qualities. The trade I'd like to see would be Andre Miller for Kwame Brown or something.
I don't like to trust paraphrases, but Jonathan Singer summary of Tom Vilsack's appearance at the Democratic candidates' forum in Nevada says "Final question covers Social Security and Medicare. Vilsack talks about balancing the budget of these programs by reindexing the program to prices, not prices and wages." Did Vilsack really say that? It's kind of technical, so people could easily miss it, but that means, over time, very large cuts in Social Security benefits.
UPDATE: Also -- I forgot to mention this, but it strikes me as a somewhat bad idea for the Democratic primary calendar to be literally organized around a series of interest group-sponsored dog-and-pony shows (I believe that after this AFSCME forum later in the year we're going to have an SEIU forum and doubtless more will be coming down the road). It presents a somewhat caricatured view of the Democratic Party and progressive politics. Either the DNC or the state parties should take the lead in organizing a reasonable number of events.
Hilzoy has the goods on Tom Vilsack's Social Security destroying ways. The Iowan's words:
First and foremost, you're going to have to take a look at the way in which Social Security is indexed. Currently, it's indexed based on wages and price; we can index it on price and still maintain the stability of Social Security and maintain the purchasing power of Social Security without necessarily jeopardizing the future of Social Security
So, yeah, screw him. Hilzoy also has him dressed as a crocodile. Maybe he'll get to be deputy agriculture secretary in the Clinton/Obama/Edwards administration.
If I may say something nice about Hillary Clinton for a minute, I think things like this attack from Will Saletan are kind of unfair:
Five years ago, Hillary Clinton supported a Senate resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. So did I. It took me four years to admit this was a mistake. I've been wondering when Clinton would admit it. Now, from campaign insiders quoted in the New York Times, comes the answer: never. As she told voters a few days ago: "If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from."
This is an amazingly stupid and arrogant position. If she sticks to it, it will probably kill her candidacy. And it should.
From where I sit, the issue here isn't that Clinton, unlike Saletan (or me) isn't willing to "admit" that supporting the war resolution was a mistake. The issue is that she doesn't think it was a mistake and she doesn't want to pretend otherwise. Clinton's executive power theory of why she votes the right way ("She believes in executive authority and Congressional deference, her advisers say, and is careful about suggesting that Congress can overrule a commander in chief") seems very plausible to me. When liberals are trying to get conservatives to worry about executive power one line a lot of us use is you realize Hillary Clinton may be president some day, right? But from Clinton's point of view, she may be president some day. What's more, as someone who was First Lady for much longer than she'd been a Senator at the time of the vote, it's natural that she would have a great deal of appreciation for the president's-eye-view take on the matter.
This isn't to say that voting for the war was the right thing to do. But there's every reason to think she thinks it was the right thing to do. She's not refusing to "admit" anything; she's just saying what she thinks.
I don't really have anything to say on the Clinton-Geffen-Obama spat from yesterday, except to observe that I was becoming so overtaken with Obama-mania (he's dreamy) that I was finding myself kinda sorta hoping he would decide that the time had come to position himself as the candidate of intellectual property law reform. Well, with David Geffen as his finance chair, probably not.
UPDATE: As you'll see in comments, Geffen hosted a big Obama fundraiser but isn't actually the finance chair. His real finance chair is Penny Pritzger, a Chicago billionaire who also happens to be the 89th most powerful woman in the world. Or at least she was in 2006. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is 18th, just above Ann Livermore of Hewlett Packard and just below Chilean president Michelle Bachelet.
Someone with the rather funny name of James Bopp, Jr. who's "joined the Romney Presidential campaign as a special adviser on life issues, an unpaid position" has an article up making the case for Multiple Choice Mitt. His basic point is that social conservatives shouldn't be worried by Romney's past history as a dogmatic pro-choicer, because we can explain the entire 1994-2002 phase of his politica career (i.e., the majority of his political career) as a giant lie when he was hiding his innermost convictions for the sake of personal advancement.
Daniel Larison is a bit skeptical about this. Let me push the ball further. When you're evaluating politicians, what they really think doesn't really matter. The essence of the matter is what will they do when the going gets tough. Romney, whatever he actually thinks about fetal and embryonic life, is obviously willing to do contradict those beliefs (if any) for the sake of political expedience. Hence, if you're serious about criminalizing abortions or if you're serious about preventing the criminalization of abortions, you can't look at Romney as a serious option.
By contrast, I know social conservatives don't like John McCain, but he's always amassed a consistent record of voting for abortion criminalization whenever possible.
Tom Vilsack has endorsed making Social Security benefits grow with prices, rather than wages—thus stopping them from growing at all, after inflation. He isn't even talking about doing it in a "progressive" way, with low-income workers shielded from the hit, as President Bush has. So on this issue, he's to the right of the president, not to mention every other candidate for the presidency in 2008.
I like his chances of securing the Democratic nomination more and more with every passing day!
I should note for the sake of precision, that once an individual's Social Security benefits are set, the do rise with prices rather than wages. The wage index comes into play when calculating your initial benefit level. It should also be said that while, technically, ending the wage index would massively cut benefits and thus save a bunch of money over the long term it's by no means clear that this would be the actual result. Before the wage index was implemented, what you had was a lot of congressional mucking about, with benefit levels raised at arbitrary points in time by arbitrary amounts according to whatever political strategy the politicians of the time were following. The wage index has served to substantially rationalize the system.
I went to see Breach last night, about the Robert Hanssen case and had a thought that will disqualify me from ever working on a presidential campaign. Namely, the terrible, terrible thing about Hanssen is supposed to be that his treason got people killed. This is emphasized several times in the film. The two people named in the film, however, were . . . Soviet traitors. From a categorical imperative point of view, it's hard to see how it can simultaneously be the case that getting traitors arrested and innocent is a terrible thing to do while identifying traitors and bringing capital charges against them is praiseworthy. This, of course, is why Alasdair MacIntyre thinks liberals can't be patriots.
At any rate, I got to wondering who the third guy Hanssen got killed was, since the movie doesn't mention him. Interestingly, the Justice Department's Inspector General's report doesn't say either, which gives me the impression that the third man's identity must be some kind of classified secret. The IG's report also makes it clear that Hanssen wasn't really all that; he went undetected for decades because the FBI didn't make any real effort to identify moles inside the FBI. As the report concludes "the FBI trusted that its employees would remain loyal throughout their careers. The Hanssen case shows the danger of that approach."
Roger Simon spins a fictional tale of 2008, resulting in John McCain's ascension to the White House. It doesn't, frankly, strike me as a particularly plausible story and that says something about McCain's odds. I do, however, have to complain about this:
[McCain] had left Blair House early that morning to go to church, two churches in fact, Grace Reformed at 15th and O and then New York Avenue Presbyterian near 13th Street. The reporters doing l
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