Good news for people in malaria-suffering countries, mostly in Africa, as a partnership between Sanofi-Aventis and Médecines sans Frontières produces a new anti-malaria drug that will be made available cheaply. I would have been interested in learning more about exactly how this partnership worked. The world of pharmaceuticals, especially pharmaceuticals for tropical diseases where the level of public health demand for drugs tends to far exceed the size of the market for them in financial terms is obviously something where the charitable sector is going to need to play a big role if you want to get things done.
But drug companies have expertise in, well, making new drugs that charities lack. So what got Sanofi-Aventis to do this and is it realistic to look for a lot more of these sorts of things in the future? Alternatively, would there be major impediments to a very well-endowed charity like the Gates Foundation just trying to set up a non-profit drug company?
So here I've been. Sick. For days. Wondering why my cold and sinus combo meds aren't clearing my sinuses. Is this the worst flu ever? Thank God for blogs! I'm reading Henley's site and he quotes Megan McArdle who says:
may have a sinus infection. I was force fed Sudafed this evening, which seems to have worked really amazingly well, but I still have to miss my conference in Vancouver this weekend, because apparently flying is a no-no when you're this stuffed up.
And can I just say that the ritual humiliation of obtaining Sudafed from a drugstore sets every liberty-loving fibre of my patriotic American soul quivering for Revolution?
And that's why it doesn't work. The Sudafed itself all went behind the counter and off-market. But many formerly pseudoephedrine-containing combo meds just switched to new, less effective ingredients and kept on selling away. Well, then it was off the Rite Aid for me to get some crystal meth effective decongestants. Wish me luck!
I haven't written much about Unity '08 since my classic 6/6/06 column on the subject, but Brendan Nyhan checks back in and finds it -- predictably -- falling flat on its face. The good news for them, however, is that they're only 4,965,000 delegates short of their minimum goals.
The really noteworthy thing about the presidential election so far is the failure of a plain-vanilla conservative Republican to emerge. Bob Novak's column on this, however, also provides a hilarious window in the wingnutty worldview as he explains that "based on his actions as speaker of the House, Gingrich's conservative record is far from flawless." I'm sure there's some crazyville definition of conservative where this comes out to be true, but Gingrich is, I think, clearly the most conservative politician likely to get anywhere near nationwide political power.
This New York Times article on North Korea nuclear program intelligence is a masterpiece of reporting but written in such a way as to obscure the significance of the scoop. I'm going to try bullet points:
The 1994 Agreed Framework froze the DPRK efforts to build a nuclear weapon using plutonium.
In 2002, the Bush administration pulled out of the Agreed Framework, arguing that the DPRK was cheating by running a secret parallel uranium program.
In the intervening years, the DPRK has succeeded in using its now-unfrozen plutonium program to build some bombs.
They have not, however, had any success in building uranium bombs.
This looked like pretty shitty policymaking for the Bush administration.
It looks much worse, however, after we learn today that the uranium program may never have existed.
The odds look decent, in other words, that the administration effectively let the DPRK build nuclear weapons for absolutely no reason at all other than its generally bad attitude toward diplomatic agreements and "stuff Bill Clinton did."
College hoops pace stats can be found here. Ohio State clocks in at 221st out of 336 Division I programs (may I note that this is an absurdly high number and part of why amateur ball ain't shit?) so when we look at Greg Oden's numbers we don't seem to be looking at a dude whose numbers are spiking because he plays on a fast team.
Tyler Cowen with a disturbing projection: "By the way, the net effect of TiVo will be more shows with ads; if they add commercials to The Sopranos, the people who hate ads can take them out themselves." I think I'm not really an ad hater as one can tell from oft-inefficient ad-skipping when I use the DVR. This, however, largely misses the virtue of advertising-free television, which is less that the ads are so bad than that the need to fit the ads changes the narrative flow.
On non-commercial television, the scenes just unfold the way the writers want them to unfold. On advertiser-supported television, by contrast, you need to have certain predetermined breaks in the show which constrains how you can pace your episode. That's the problem. Sports broadcasts, which are mostly able to fit the ads into fairly natural stoppages in play, are in some ways enhanced by the advertising breaks which give you a chance to chat with your friends, urinate, grab another beer, etc.
Glenn Greenwald on the war party's bizarre refusal to actually come out and say that it favors war with Iran:
For that reason, Stuttaford has been repeatedly asking the Warriors what they think we ought to do about Iran if negotiations are so misguided, and they keep refusing to answer. Finally Rubin was forced to address the question, and he began this way: "What would I suggest? When it comes to economic measures, Patrick Clawson provides some useful suggestions." He does not, of course, say that we should confine ourselves to those "economic measures," because that's not what he believes. He thus proceeds to reject various other measures (while never saying which ones he favors) and then finishes with this pronouncement:
Nor do I believe it in U.S. interests to acquiesce to the Revolutionary Guard and Office of the Supreme Leader with nuclear arms. Their ideology matters; it would be unwise to project our own values upon those circles in Iran which would control such capability. With regard to much more precise options, such things are better discussed in private, and I would be glad to do so.
So Rubin is unwilling to say publicly what he thinks the U.S. should do with regard to Iran. He is willing to unveil his great insights only in secret, closed-door meetings at the AEI at shadowy gatherings of our nation's neoconservative foreign policy geniuses, but is not willing to advocate those ideas to his fellow citizens in public forums.
Only Rubin is dumb enough to get caught up in this precise phrasing, but the basic pattern is everywhere.
"Rice Names Critic Of Iraq Policy to Counselor's Post" -- hey, I thought, maybe positive change is on the way. Well, no, I didn't actually think that was likely. Instead I thought, let's click the article and see all the ways in which this turns out to be a scam. Well:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has tapped Eliot A. Cohen, a prominent writer on national security strategy and an outspoken critic of the administration's postwar occupation of Iraq, as her counselor, State Department officials said yesterday.
Of course, what Bush and Bush's supporters like about Cohen is that his book, Supreme Command, is read by them as offering justification for the White House's habit of overruling military experts and substituting instead the judgment of idiots. That's probably a bit unfair to Cohen himself, who seems to have had in mind overruling the generals when your national political leadership isn't dominated by fools, but still. Cohen is a pioneering incompetence dodger of the right, enjoys making spurious accusations of anti-semitism, and generally speaking should fit right in with the rest of Team Bush.
I keep not blogging about David Iglesias' firing from his U.S. Attorney's job in New Mexico because it doesn't seem like the central focus of the post should be our similar last names, but I can't really get past it. My last name frequently gets misspelled, so when I see blogs writing about "Iglesias" on some level my instinct is to assume they're talking about me. But, well, they aren't. Get over it. The salient thing about the involvement of Heather Wilson and Pete Domenici is that their seats are both somewhat vulnerable. Domenici, in particular, is a classic case of a guy who as a clean incumbent is hard to beat, but where the GOP could easily lose an open seat and/or a race where the incumbent is tainted by scandal. My understanding is that the strongest possible Democratic contenders have been shying away from entering the race unless Domenici decides to step down. They should probably reconsider that.
A new study has found that employed women living with their employed partner actually spend more time doing housework than single women.
The men, on the other hand see the hours they commit to housework decline once they begin living as a couple.
"Gee," remarks Jessica Valenti, "wonder why that is." Well, I like to wonder. Later, the piece gives us the specific numbers: "an employed woman does 15 hours a week of housework when she lives with her employed partner, up from 10 hours when single." On the flipside? "Meanwhile the men, who do seven hours while living alone, do only five when they co-habit." So the result here actually shows that there are two different things happening here. One is that men and women have different ex ante levels of cleanliness. Single women do 10 hours of housework, whereas single men only do seven. A perfectly equitable division of labor, should result in a couple doing a combined seventeen hours and then splitting it evenly -- 8.5 hours each.
That, however, doesn't happen. Instead, you see male shirking to the tune of 3.5 hours -- cutting the male second shift down to five hours a week, and boosting the woman's up to 12 hours. But then women put three more hours of housework in per week. The effect of those three additional hours is to raise the couples' cleanliness standard up to the 10 hours per week per person maintained by single women. The higher ex ante level of female cleanliness creates an unfavorable initial bargaining positition. A woman can enter a relationship determined to avoid raising her housework level above the previous ten hours per week. If the man then shirks down to five hours a week of work (from a previous high of seven) he'll be doing less work than he did while single, and living in a cleaner house. A perfectly good deal for him. Then he sits and waits for pre-existing gender norms and his wife higher ex ante expectations of cleanliness (themselves a result of the same norms) to drive her to put in even more work to raise the household to the cleanliness level that existed before he moved in.
Dana Stevens: "But can we just start with something very basic here? Chaining someone to your radiator is wrong. Depriving a near-naked and recently assaulted stranger of the most basic physical liberty for days on end is a sick, perverse, and cruel thing to do." That seems right to me.
Ari Berman has an article about how Max Baucus pretty much sucks. Ezra Klein likes it. I do, too. The New Republic did a July 2006 editorial on the evils of Baucus. And, of course, way back in February, 2004 I did one of my first print articles for The American Prospect about this.
It's excellent for relief from a cold-related sore throat, of course. What's more, unless Ed Kilgore's summary of Ramesh Ponnuru's case for John McCain is wildly inaccurate, it seems like a good description of what's got to be one of the most half-hearted endorsements I've ever read. It doesn't seem to endorse any of McCain's flirtations with breaking with conservative orthodoxy. Rather, taking the view that Abortion Conquers All and Multiple Choice Mitt's a joke, Ponnuru argues that McCain's flirtations with heterodoxy weren't so bad, he's promising to be a good rightwinger in the future, and Rudy Giuliani wants to kill your unborn children.
Fair enough, I guess. But still, the primaries are a long way away. You'd think it might be the role of a magazine like National Review to try and promote the fortunes of a proper plain-vanilla conservative Republican. A Jim Gilmore or a Mike Huckabee or whomever. It's not exactly a rare breed in the country, it's just that nobody who fits the bill (except for Jeb Bush) has the requisite level of ex ante fame to get buzz. But why be a journalist if not to try and generate buzz about people you think are being unjustly ignored?
Do conservatives understand that given the gross unpopularity of Bush's military adventures at this point, nominating someone whose main profile as a conservative is grounded in his strong rhetorical support of Bush's military adventures isn't going to work out well?
Nothing is more frightening than the "logic" sportwriters employ when talking about MVP votes. Marc Stein, for example, wants to hand out an Eastern Conference Second Trimester MVP award to . . . Chris Webber: "But since we're focused on this specific chunk of 27 (or so) games, you'd have to say Webber's value to his new team stands out in a close call over Toronto's Chris Bosh." Come now. Webber been playing well, but he's not even the most valuable Piston and everyone knows it. The sequence in which people joined the team can't be the decisive consideration here.
After receiving an introduction from Mitt Romney, Ann Coulter took to the stage at CPAC, called John Edwards a "faggot", and, later, apparently endorsed the Romney campaign. Why doesn't this kind of thing ever seem to make media trouble for Republicans. I feel like any progressive even vaguely associated with the hint of impropriety faces massive pressure to "distance" himself, apologize, disavow his friends, etc.
Does Coulter speak for Mitt Romney? The list of Coulterisms is a long one and not, one would think, something Romney wants to embrace. But he's been changing his mind about a lot of things lately, so maybe he's now a Coulterite through-and-through. Doesn't it seem like someone should at least ask?
How is it that this government science report showing how full of crap the administration's global warming policy is ever got released? Here you have charts and plain language making it clear that the administration's policy goal of reducing the economy's "carbon intensity" is, when properly understood, absolutely useless. I remember a time when Team Bush would have kept this all under wraps. I mean, this is wartime -- we can't have accurate information that makes the president look bad right out there in public view. Was everyone too busy firing US Attorneys or something?
Multiple Choice Mitt's number one fan K-Lo explains that there's no need for her candidate to disavow Ann Coulter's "faggot" remarks because it was just Ann Coulter being Ann Coulter and "is anyone suprised Ann said something she really shouldn't have?"
Well, no, nobody's surprised. That's what makes Romney's behavior all the more outrageous. If you choose to affiliate yourself with a respectable politicial pundit, and then that pundit goes on and does something crazy and out-of-character, I think you can reasonably say you couldn't have predicted that and it has nothing to do with you. Coulter, though, is well-known for this crap. But Romney decided to embrace it anyway. Because now that he's reinvented himself as a wingnut, I guess he figures he should be the wingnuttiest wingnut he can be.
So . . . if you think back to when the Allen Iverson trade went down, that event attracted an awful lot of basketball commentary. Many people thought it turned the Nuggets into contenders. People mocked the Sixers for getting so little in exchange. Bill Simmons and other talked about how Iverson was one of the top fifty players of all time. And yet I feel like since the trade there's been a curious silence around the fact that the post-deal Nuggets . . . aren't a very good team. I mean, they're okay but not clearly better than they were last year or before the deal.
And you can't really say that The Answer doesn't have any help any more. The thing of it is that you had two guys, 'Melo and Iverson, who were high-volume shooters, big-time scorers, but relatively inefficient scorers. The bet is that putting them side-by-side changes that and one or both of them becomes much more efficient than they were as sole foci of the offense. What you got last night, though, was just two dudes combining to take 47 of the team's 78 field goal attempts and only hitting 18 of them. Maybe next year when they have the chance to work together in the offseason, things will change. But it seems to me that, at a minimum, all the sportswriters who hailed this deal or slammed the Sixers have some kind of obligation to write about it again and say something.
The nuclear crisis with Iran was averted Saturday when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the entire Iranian nuclear program was traded to the New York Knicks for point guard Stephon Marbury. Iran will also get the Knicks' first two draft picks.
Joe Klein's "you might be a left-wing extremist if..." list is quite revealing. A number of his items are somewhat strawmannish substantive positions. Many of them, however, rather plainly have nothing whatsoever to do with extremism of any sort. To wit:
Dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
Regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.
I mean, there's a term for people who express left-of-center views in a vulgar manner and it isn't "extremist" -- it's vulgar. The sentiment "that asshole Bush ruined the balanced budgets of the 1990s all for the sake of his fucking tax cuts" is perfectly centrist. Similarly, whether or not you tend to mock people you disagree with about matters of religion is just a matter of politeness. But rudeness has no ideology. Under certain circumstances, of course, it's important to maintain a certain standard of politeness, but there's no reason to elevate this to a core ideological point.
The world must work to stop Iran's uranium enrichment program and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is far too dangerous to have nuclear weapons in the hands of a radical theocracy. And while we should take no option, including military action, off the table, sustained and aggressive diplomacy combined with tough sanctions should be our primary means to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.
Well, I'd like to know what the next paragraph said before offering any judgments, since that's pretty ambiguous without context. Interestingly, this gang of anti-semitesJewish Week article suggests that Jewish financial clout within the Democratic Party is significant and may influence what viable candidates can say about Middle East policy.
M.J. Rosenberg has the full text of Barack Obama's AIPAC speech. On Iran, I think this is somewhat better than what John Edwards and Hillary Clinton have said to similar audiences in terms of tone, though some of Edwards' (and, for that matter, Bill Richardson's) remarks in the post-Herziliya backlash have been better than this. The best part was this:
But we owe it to our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, and to all those who have fallen, to keep searching for peace and security -- even though it can seem distant. This search is in the best interests of Israel. It is in the best interests of the United States. It is in the best interests of all of us.
The worst part was this:
But in the end, we also know that we should never seek to dictate what is best for the Israelis and their security interests. No Israeli Prime Minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States.
That's silly. We should give Israel billions of dollars a year but should never make an Israeli Prime Minister "feel dragged to . . . the negotiating table" even though going there "is in the best interests of Israel. It is in the best interests of the United States" -- that doesn't make sense. I did, however, like the inclusion of the "or blocked from the negotiating table" proviso, a subtle dig at the Bush administration's bizarre pressuring of Israel to avoid making peace with Syria.
After centuries full of vibrant interaction, of marrying, sharing and selling across sects and classes, Baghdad has become a capital of corrosive and violent borderlines. Streets never crossed. Conversations never started. Doors never entered.
Sunnis and Shiites in many professions now interact almost exclusively with colleagues of the same sect. Sunnis say they are afraid to visit hospitals because Shiites loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr run the Health Ministry, while Shiite laborers who used to climb into the back of pickup trucks for work across the Tigris River in Sunni western Baghdad now take jobs only near home.
I'm told, though, that the sectarian-segregated crews have done a really good job of painting many schools. Many schools. Why do you hate America?
CPAC goes for Multiple Choice Mitt. My early guess is that out of Romney, Giuliani, and McCain, the Massachusetts governor is likely to be the least-awful president if he wins and also the least-likely to win if he gets the nomination. So I'm all for conservatives falling in love with the guy.
There's a nice profile in The Politico of Winslow Wheeler, director of the military reform project at the Center for Defense Information. As the article makes clear, the quest to see defense spending decisions driven by something other than pork-barrel considerations and lobbying clout is a thankless one, but with luck he'll find at least some measure of success in a Democratic congress.
Like Duncan, I recently took a gander at the works of The Left and the experience was . . . bracing. It used dirty words! It hated the troops! And people of faith! Especially people of faith who were also troops. Hated them with nasty, dirty, nasty dirty words. At times, it said that ice cream was more delicious than capitalism.
Ross Douthat mostly says everything that needs to be said, but let me just state it very clearly -- the idea that Ronald Reagan's charisma and sunny disposition won landslide victories for Barry Goldwater's substantive views on the size and scope of government is false. Very false.
Reagan was, famously, the political beneficiary of a backlash against the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The important thing to remember about this is that unless you think people were lashing back against the Peace Corps, this was a backlash entirely against programs that didn't exist during Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. It was only after Goldwater lost that "welfare as we knew it," Medicare, Medicaid, major federal involvement in education, federal environmental policy, federal consumer safety regulations, affirmative action, etc. came into exist. Reagan's political mobilization was aimed at a subset of this post-Goldwater flowering of big government. He didn't tilt against Medicare, by far the biggest Great Society program. And he certainly didn't campaign for the repeal of the New Deal (indeed, he repeatedly explicitly disavowed any intention of doing so).
The Goldwater-Reagan similarity is that they both led "conservative" factions of the GOP against "accommodationist" factions. But between 1964 and 1976 the country experienced a massive policy revolution that shifted the status quo way, way, way to the left of where it had been. Reagan then simultaneously shifted the GOP to the right of where Gerald Ford had initially positioned it while shifting the conservative movemenet to the left -- to acceptance of a federal responsibility for retirement security and quality education, to acceptance of the Civil Rights Act (opposition to which was, of course, Goldwater's only reliable vote-getter in '64), and to acceptance of popular middle class entitlement programs.
Since my primary area of interest in foreign policy, I've been facing something of a conundrum in looking at the Democratic primary candidates for the simple reason that, as best I can tell, stated foreign policy views during a presidential campaign have almost no relationship to things that happen in office. So you try to look a bit at personnel. I saw recently that Barack Obama had hired Dan Shapiro, formerly of Bill Nelson's office, to be a consultant on Middle East issues but didn't know what to make of that. Richard Silverstein, however, has a potential observation:
I would note that before joining the Obama campaign, Dan Shapiro served as Jewish outreach coordinator for Senator Bill Nelson. Nelson was one of the first U.S. senators to visit Bashar Assad in Syria and take home the message that Syria wants peace and negotiation with Israel. I don't know what role, if any, Shapiro played on that trip. But I admired the guts it took for Nelson to buck our country's declared policy of isolating Syria.
Again, though, for all we know Shapiro's role in the trip was to advise Nelson not to do it so the significance of this is less than totally obvious. This leads me to recall that nobody seems to mention this, but former Rep. David Bonior, who's gone to work for John Edwards, is not only a noted labor leader, but also quite possibly the Israel lobby's least-liked legislator in recently history.
Yes, it's true, The Weekly Standard decided that the best candidate to assess the ongoing progress of the Bush/McCain/Kagan surge plan was Fred Kagan's wife, Kimberly. Worse, Andrew Sullivan reports that she was on the planning team her husband put together to write the surge plan in the first place.
I can't say that I really know anything about Mike Huckabee. It strikes me, though, that he's the kind of person I would expect to see win a Republican nomination -- a white Protestant conservative Republican governor who's never deliberately antagonized conservative leaders and also doesn't seem to be a weirdo. Michael Scherer bothered to learn some facts and write the profile for Salon. He says Huckabee's charming. His political approach:
"If I really know what it means to follow Jesus, it means no kid goes hungry tonight," he said, at one stop in Iowa. "It means no wife gets the daylights beat out of her by some alcoholic abusive husband. It means no kid lives in a neighborhood where he is scared to death of some child predator that is going to pick him up and carry him off. It means not one single elderly person has to make the choice between food or medicine." Unlike former Sen. Rick Santorum or Sen. Sam Brownback, Huckabee does not spend time pounding the pulpit over baby murder and sodomy. He's a self-styled "compassionate conservative," a poll-tested concept that worked once before. But while President Bush discarded the slogan like a prom queen's sash, Huckabee wants to convince America that he is the real deal.
Huckabee is, obviously, a longshot. The odds favor Giuliani and McCain. Nevertheless, over the long haul I think it's clear that the Huckabee approach -- marrying religious traditionalism with some kind of revived effort to cope with domestic social policy problems -- is more promising for Republicans than the tax cuts and war platform of a Giuliani.
I have no particular doubt that Jim Nicholas, Bush's appointee to run the Department of Veterans Affairs, may well have screwed things up but would it kill The New York Times to make it clear that Walter Reed is not a VA hospital? It's an Army facility where they treat wounded soldiers, and it's administratively distinct. Ann Hull and Dana Preist at The Washington Post, by contrast, go wide with a look at other military medical centers comparably situation to Walter Reed. Suffice it to say that there are further problems here:
Hundreds of soldiers contacted The Washington Post through telephone calls and e-mails, many of them describing their bleak existence in Medhold.
From Fort Campbell in Kentucky: "There were yellow signs on the door stating our barracks had asbestos."
From Fort Bragg in North Carolina: "They are on my [expletive] like a diaper. . . . there are people getting chewed up everyday."
From Fort Dix in New Jersey: "Scare tactics are used against soldiers who will write sworn statement to assist fellow soldiers for their medical needs."
From Fort Irwin in California: "Most of us have had to sign waivers where we understand that the housing we were in failed to meet minimal government standards."
The article does go on to note some veterans problems; in particular great difficulty actually getting benefits people are entitled to because the administration doesn't seem to have actually enhanced the VA's capability to deliver services very much while it's also massively ramped up the supply of wounded veterans in need of service. Chalk the declining conditions at the military hospitals up as another victory in the GOP passion for contracting out government services.
Agent Zero gets the Klosterman treatment in PLAY. It's an eminently readable piece, but it leaves me disquieted. Bethlehem Shoals gets at much of the problem, but let me attempt to rephrase somewhat. At its best, Gilbert's game is mercurial. It's not only that he can hit a very long three if that's the only shot available at the end of the clock; he sometimes will take that shot early in the clock, calmly walking the ball up the court, realizing that his defender hasn't deigned to guard him closely that far out. He also has a move where, for no real reason, he just keeps dribbling and dribbling doing nothing until there's not enough time left for a drive to the basket and then makes the drive because he's that fast.
But he's not just a dude with a quick drive and a long range, he's a guy who might take that long shot at any time and can blow past you at any time -- it's never too early, never too late, he plays with no conscience. This is important to making him effective. The risk of the long bomb early in the clock sets up the drive. The risk of the drive late in the clock sets up the long bomb. That's Basketball 101, but it's also Gilbertology 101; all the rest of the "weirdness" serves to render the predictable cultivation of unpredictability once again unpredictable. Other players have "so many ways to beat you" applied methodically; Gilbert has crazy skills and is a crazy man, you never know what he's going to do. This is part of his game not part of his marketing pitch.
Ron Brynaert at Raw Story makes the convincing case about GOP passion for privatization of government services and the problems at Walter Reed. Jim Henley reminds me that I posted on the general problem here last month -- it's not as if there are dozens of United States Armies all competing against one another to run the best hospitals and choosing among a variety of suppliers of hospital services in a dynamic marketplace where the Army that runs a bad hospital goes out of business.
You've got private profits, private corporations, privatization, and all sorts of other private stuff, but you don't have a market you have a patronage mill and you have suffering soldiers. The correct way to privatize government services if you don't think they should be provided by the government is to just have the government not perform the service. If it's something you think the government should provide -- medical care for injured soldiers would be, I think, an uncontroversial case -- then the government needs to provide it.
Caught live on tape, Mitt Romney hangs out back stage with Ann Coulter discussing his plan to name her his Vice Presidential nominee, Coulter's admiration for his deft abortion flip-flopts, and Romney's meeting with James Dobson in which he made some early efforts to smooth over the whole is Romey a Christian issue.
This comes to me via Dave Weigel who observes that "Romney apparatchiks Barbara Comstock and Jay Sekulow work to keep the camera at bay, but they fail to protect their wooden candidate from looking like an awkward fanboy." Also check out Russell Arben Fox on Mike Huckabee.
Ross Douthat points out that I was skeptical that conservatives would feel pressure to distance themselves from Ann Coulter in response to her "faggot" remarks but, in fact, many conservatives have so distanced themselves. And good for them. I assumed they wouldn't because, frankly, calling Edwards a faggot is pretty small potatos for Coulter. Obviously, I'd forgotten the Conservative Rule of Decency which is that calling, explicitly or implicitly, for one's political rivals to be killed and/or imprisoned is fine, but using naughty language is not. Coulter, by unleashing the other F-Bomb, joined me in forgetting this rule and wound up being punished.
Still, it still is odd. If Coulter had accused Edwards of Treason nobody on the right would have batted an eye. But these are the rules of the game. Of course, nobody's actually fired Coulter for anything so it's not like her little screwup has really cost her anything.
I don't think this is an endorsement Obama had to make for political reasons. As Dick Morris says, he's sitting pretty--he can be anything he wants to be. He could be a lot more Gary Hartish! He must want to be an old-fashioned unionizer. [But he has to win the Iowa caucuses, dominated by unions--ed Teachers' unions! They're already organized. They don't need no stinking card-check.** As for New Hampshire--look what the unions did for Mondale in 1984. ... And if Obama doesn't really believe in the card-check, wouldn't it still be smart for the GOPs to make him pay a price for selling out to the unions? That's a lot more important sign that he's a business-as-usual pol than his failure to repudiate David Geffen for taking some heartfelt shots at the Clintons.. ... ]
The endorsement in question is of the Employee Free Choice Act. Kaus is, I think, stuck in a time warp. Obviously, Obama would earn the undying enmity of all the unions in Iowa and New Hampshire (and everywhere else, for that matter) if he declined to endorse EFCA. That would be bad. What's more, at this point in time everyone in progressive politics is for card check. All the bloggers are for it. Here's Jon Chait in The Los Angeles Times in favor of card check. Here's the DLC in favor of card check. Here's a New Republic editorial praising unions.
The consituency for Kaus-style union-bashing in the Democratic Party is just gone. Obama would lose the support not just of the unions but of everyone if he didn't endorse card check. What's more, Obama's a liberal community organizer -- of course he's for making it easier to form a union.
Joe Klein names a few characteristics of right-wing extremists, including:
believes that homosexuals are condemned to hell.
believes that there are inferior religions.
Obviously, I hold no such beliefs. But these beliefs are widespread. What's more, I don't really think it's fair to condemn people for holding them. To me the belief that gay sex acts are immoral is false and hard-to-justify. It's not, however, politically objectionable unless the believer goes on to believe that government policy should be aimed at criminalizing gay sex acts or discriminating against gays or lesbians. After all, there are tons of religious prohibitions (Muslims don't drink alcohol, Hindus don't eat beef, Jews don't eat pigs, Pentacostalists don't dance) that I don't agree with, but that I also don't have a problem with unless the believers want to turn them into legal prohibitions.
On the inferior religions point, I think it's even clearer. I would expect a religious believer to believe that his religion is "the best" and that the others are "inferior" in some sense. Likewise, there's nothing wrong, really, with Christians believing that non-Christian faiths are inferior to Christianity in that they don't result in the salvation of your immortal soul. The problem would be if someone thought there should be legal discrimination against people who believe in non-favored faiths.
A couple of days ago, I saw a broadcast sitcom -- a Friends re-run -- for the first time in years. It was a slightly bizarre experience. In particular, the show is punctuated with . . . pre-recorded laughter. Then, today, at Catherine's request I watched How I Met Your Mother. And, I have to say, until I heard it I never really considered the possibility that contemporary sitcoms are still relying on this device. It's bizarre. Lighthearted half-hour cable shows -- Entourage, The Sarah Silverman Program, Curb Your Enthusiasm, etc. -- seem to get by quite well without it.
Which is to say nothing of the "humor." Obviously, I didn't grasp the subtle nuances of the show. But (by design) you don't need to actually know who any of the characters are or anything about them to get the "jokes." Indeed, the jokes could have been from a Friends episode that aired in 1995 -- apparently the only comedic premise available to sitcom writers is that women like relationships whereas men are afraid of commitment. No, wait, they also have jokes based on homophobia.
UPDATE: In many ways, though, the awfulness of The Black Donnellys renders all other TV-related complaining irrelevant.
With a little help from Glenn Greenwald, Jim Henley's been reading an old 1998 New Republic article by Condoleezza Rice's new "counselor," Eliot Cohen. It's all about how we must reject the dogmas of the past and embrace the new imperial future:
One cannot separate the so-called “soft power” of the United States–the global dominance of its culture, beginning with its language–from its military strength.
Rock fans around the world listen in English; so do fighter pilots. The same information technologies that make the Internet a decidedly American phenomenon provide the nervous systems of American military power. Free trade rests on common consent, to be sure, but would it exist absent America’s military dominance?
Henley has some fun with the apparent claim here that American popular music is popular because of our military might. It is, of course, well known that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones became so popular in the 1960s because the British Empire was then at its peak.
It's the trade element of this, however, that's truly pernicious. Cohen would like us to believe that basic commerce and prosperity require us to join him down the path where "citizen and soldier alike must brace themselves for the occasional imperial fiasco" and "accept the uncomfortable notion that they are wielding military power in a way that is historically unusual for a country that has long viewed empires with proper republican suspicion." There is, however, just no reason whatsoever to believe this. If we stopped seeking to coercively dominate the Middle East then . . . all those Japanese cars would just disappear from the dealerships? International capital flows would stop? China would shut down the iPod factories? Europeans would turn their back on Coca-Cola? I mean, yes, the US navy and allied military forces need to be strong enough to prevent pirates from ruling the high seas but this has approximately nothing to do with the imperial vision Cohen and co. have in mind.
Realistically, the imperialist conception of world affairs is inimicable to the spirit of commerce which requires us not to see politics as an endless series of zero-sum standoffs in which power is used to facilitate parasitic exploitation. In the domestic sphere, this is the difference between the mentality of the businessman and that of the gangster. Internationally, we see the trader versus the conquistador; the liberal spirit of international cooperation versus the grim gaze of the imperialist.
More importantly, the claims "sound right wing" but actually they provide the best argument for single-payer health insurance to be found: "The link between health and health care is murky, so let's just save money on our health system."
A few important differences, though, since Cowen isn't actually a left-wing single-payer advocate. It's not just that you can save money, but there are also significant gains from the point of view of equality and social justice. What's more, a single-payer system does allow you to funnel additional health care resources to a handful of areas -- notably prenatal and postnatal care and pediatrics -- where it's uncontroversially the case that delivery of non-expensive services brings about some significant gains. Beyond that, though, if you want to make people healthier you need to talk less about health care and more about the dread lifestyle.
It's a few days old at this point, but Barack Obama's speech in Selma, Alabama is worth a read. He faced a somewhat tricky task. A white politician goes to such an event merely to pay homage to the giants of the past and their struggle, and to pledge fealty to the contemporary leaders of the African-American community. Obama's task is to identify himself as a leader of that community. But worse as the leader -- as the President of the United States. But this is presumptuous. What did Obama do? Are his accomplishments greater than those of the older generation that marched at Selma and elsewhere? No. His accomplishments are lesser. He is in a position to go further than they were not because of his efforts but because of their efforts. How to gain their support?
Obama, in his speech, aims for an analogy with Joshua. Not, compared to Moses, the greater leader of the Jewish people. But, rather, the successor; the one designated to build on Moses' work and lead the people into the promised land. Certainly, I'm not a grizzled veteran of the Civil Rights movement, so I can't say for sure how this will play, but it seems pretty clever to me.
I think it can also work as a larger metaphor. Progressives these days have a sometimes angsty relationship with the social movements of the 1960s and 70s. The sense that, ultimately, these movements failed and the Democratic Party came to disaster through its association with them is inescapable. And yet precisely what we don't want to do is mimick the smarmy neoliberals of the 1980s and 1990s, forever full of scorn, forever eager to blame the left for the right's malgovernment, forever looking to get ahead by knifing an ally in the back.
Arguably, Obama's hit on the right way to think about all this. The movements of yore accomplished a great deal and were absolutely right about the biggest issues of their time. But they made some mistakes. Mistakes that are dwarfed by the scale of their accomplishments; but nonetheless mistakes that carried a high price. Conveniently enough, 2008 could mark the end of 40 desert years launched by Nixon and capped by Bush. Enough time gone by for old wounds to heal, perhaps, and for a new generation of political leadership to redeem the promises of that earlier era.
GFR comments on and heartily excerpts some paywalled Nick Kristof content about Barack Obama's experiences growing up partially in Indonesia. "He once got in trouble for making faces during Koran study classes in his elementary school," writes Kristof, "but a president is less likely to stereotype Muslims as fanatics -- and more likely to be aware of their nationalism -- if he once studied the Koran with them." One would certainly hope so. On the other hand, the last major American political figure to be knowledgable about Indonesia was . . . Paul Wolfowitz. And we all know how that turned out.
Meanwhile, Democrats who opposed the surge sure do look foolish now that it's working so well.
Rich Lowry says Rudy Giuliani has what it takes to be the antidote to George W. Bush's incompetence:
Giuliani’s axioms of governance, described in his book “Leadership,” now read as a kind of rebuttal to Bush’s hands-off management style. One of his rules is “Always Sweat the Small Stuff.” Another is “Prepare Relentlessly.” He delivered annual 90-minute State of the City addresses without a prepared text: “I presented it from my own head and heart, not from a page.” And “Everyone’s Accountable, All of the Time.” Giuliani kept a two-word sign on his desk: “I’M RESPONSIBLE.”
Famously the first CEO president, Bush has had his reputation as an executive trashed by Katrina and Iraq. Bush had seen his role primarily as setting goals, then remaining resolute and confident about them. But the resolution and confidence are self-defeating if the goals aren’t matched with the appropriate means. Bush has been ill-served by his willingness to stand by failed subordinates (thereby eroding any sense of accountability), by his relative lack of interest in details and by his inability to establish coherence within his own government.
I haven't been following or blogging about the Scooter Libby trial, but Jeff Lomonaco, who's been covering it for the Prospect, makes a very good bottom-line point: "Vice President's main adviser has just been convicted of obstructing an investigation not just of himself but of the Vice President." Insofar as Libby looks unlikely to flip on Cheney, it appears the effort to obstruct the underlying investigation can be deemed a success.
A while back, I was distraught by how early the presidential campaign season had begun since I found the 2004 primaries somewhat excrutiating. Now, I'm anticipating big fun covering the GOP field:
Mitt Romney is the most freakishly transparent liar I've ever witnessed. His party is desperately reliant on playing the Christian card on election day, but most traditionalist Christians deny that his religion counts as Christianity. He can't decide which state he's from, invested major resources in barely winning a Conservative Political Action Committee straw poll last weekend, and, for his trouble, managed to snag the endorsement of Ann Coulter at the same time she was calling John Edwards a "faggot."
Then there's McCain. To the kind of liberal who spent 2002 fantasizing about McCain beating Bush in '04 on the Democratic ticket, his pathetic decline is probably a sad story. To me, it's more like a funny one -- like when that guy slipped and fell down a flight of stairs and it all looked very painful but he was a huge jerk anyway. McCain is old. And sick. And obviously so. He has the misfortune of being both the most conservative candidate in the race and the one most hated by conservatives. His website makes it look like he's campaigning for Führer. Worst of all, George W. Bush's Iraq policy is so crazy that it's managed to ruin McCain's devilishly clever positioning on Iraq.
SUNDAY NIGHT PLENARY - The U.S. and Israel: Tradition and Transcendence
Two eloquent voices from diverse backgrounds explore the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and how Americans from all faiths can find common cause in supporting Israel.
Pastor John Hagee
Author and Scholar Michael Oren
Special Guest Eitan Wertheimer, Chairman of the Board of ISCAR
Who's John Hagee? Sarah Posner can tell you all about it. I'll just note this:
In Hagee’s telling, Israel has no choice but to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, with or without America’s help. The strike will provoke Russia -- which wants Persian Gulf oil -- to lead an army of Arab nations against Israel. Then God will wipe out all but one-sixth of the Russian-led army, as the world watches “with shock and awe,” he says, lending either a divine quality to the Bush administration phrase or a Bush-like quality to God’s wrath.
But Hagee doesn’t stop there. He adds that Ezekiel predicts fire “‘upon those who live in security in the coastlands.’” From this sentence he concludes that there will be judgment upon all who stood by while the Russian-led force invaded Israel, and issues a stark warning to the United States to intervene: “Could it be that America, who refuses to defend Israel from the Russian invasion, will experience nuclear warfare on our east and west coasts?” He says yes, citing Genesis 12:3, in which God said to Israel: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you.”
To fill the power vacuum left by God’s decimation of the Russian army, the Antichrist -- identified by Hagee as the head of the European Union -- will rule “a one-world government, a one-world currency and a one-world religion” for three and a half years. (He adds that “one need only be a casual observer of current events to see that all three of these things are coming into reality.”) The “demonic world leader” will then be confronted by a false prophet, identified by Hagee as China, at Armageddon, the Mount of Megiddo in Israel. As they prepare for the final battle, Jesus will return on a white horse and cast both villains -- and presumably any nonbelievers -- into a “lake of fire burning with brimstone,” thus marking the beginning of his millennial reign.
So you see, John Hagee, who wants to see Israel adopt a hawkish foreign policy that he believes will result in its destruction at the hands of a Russo-Arab alliance is a friend of the Jews. By contrast, everyone who thinks a little pressure to make peace could wind up helping Israel in the long run is an anti-semite.
This is true. In all honestly, though, I would at least think Ross might be a Huckabee enthusiast, even though his campaign is obviously doomed. It also bears mentioning that Huckabee isn't even my favorite Republican -- that honor goes to Chuck Hagel who I guess isn't officially running. At a minimum, though, he should toss his hat into the ring and run an anti-war campaign saying real conservatism is about limited government and traditional values at home, and that in foreign policy terms neither limited government nor traditional American values nor traditional Christian values supports Bush-style neo-imperialism. He won't win, but it'd be nice to see someone keep the Terrible Three on their toes.
As a general matter, I find the conservative inability to get enthused about a dark horse -- pick a dark horse, any dark horse, and get enthused -- totally impossible to comprehend. Is everyone really so excited about John McCain drooling his way through a general election?
Over the weekend, Mitt Romney called for repealing McCain-Feingold. Which made me wonder about the candidates' record on the issue. McCain's we know about.
Romney, it turns out, has—surprise, surprise—been on both sides of campaign-finance reform. In his 1994 race, Romney came out for banning political action committees, limiting spending on federal races (something the Supreme Court has not allowed), and opposed allowing larger contributions. All told, those positions place him to the left of McCain-Feingold, which doubled the allowable size of individual donations to candidates. In his 2002 race, he took the position that campaign contributions should be taxed at a 10 percent race, with the proceeds going to public funding of all campaigns.
Taxing campaign contributions to fund a public financing system is a longstanding pet notion of mine. Have I mentioned that I voted for Mitt Romney in 2002? Mistakes were made, but he was, um, rather different back then. In Romney's defense, none of these past positions is strictly inconsistent with support for repealing McCain-Feingold. Someone covering the Romney campaign should just ask the candidates straightforwardly if he still adheres to those 1994 and 2002 vintage positions.
Peter Baker in The Washington Post: "For an administration that [i.e. the Libby trial] has been unusually opaque and mostly insulated from aggressive congressional oversight and prosecutorial investigation, it may seem like a gut-churning harbinger." There's much truth to this. The list of persons potentially facing criminal liability for actions undertaken at the behest of George W. Bush or on behalf of his administration is extremely long. Of course, in practice it's exceedingly unlikely that Bush himself or, say, Donald Rumsfeld will ever face prosecution for war crimes they've ordered, but there's at least a chance. And from the top various forms of criminality go all the way down and fan out throughout the agencies.
This, it always seemed to me, was one of the great unreported pretexts of the 2004 election. Team Bush was, substantially, fighting for its continued freedom. The mere fact of re-election, however, greatly shields them. Without a successor to try to put into the White House, there's really very little impediment to the administration not only stonewalling at any turn, but simply handing out pardons whenever necessary. That's how his dad did business and it worked.
The All Wise Voices of Reason at The Washington Post editorial board poo-poo the Libby verdict and conclude with a sniff: "Mr. Fitzgerald was, at least, right about one thing: The Wilson-Plame case, and Mr. Libby's conviction, tell us nothing about the war in Iraq."
Come now. That reads like a dispatch from, say, mid-2004 when there was a serious debate in this country about the Iraq War. From the vantage point of March 2007 what could we possibly learn that would change our minds about the Iraq War. We learned, years ago, that the WMD case was a mess. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. Nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea has gotten worse. Thousands of American soldiers are dead. Tens of thousands more are wounded, many of them seriously. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. And nothing has been accomplished. There was nothing left for the Libby conviction to possibly tell us about the war; the war debate ship left the port years ago.
I got all excited because I thought Michael Ledeen was linking to an official announcement here:
I think the appeasers ought to have a candidate in the Republican primaries, and he's their ideal standard-bearer. So far as I know, he never met a dictator he didn't want to appease.
Turns out to just be some speculation. It's worth considering the charges here. Appeasement, as we know, is bad because when tried vis-a-vis Adolf Hitler it didn't succeed. Is it really so implausible that during Chuck Hagel's term in the Senate, from 1996 to the present day, he feels the United States has not encountered any genuinely Hitleresque dictators on the world stage?
This, of course, is the perplexing thing about the Munich analogy. It's made with a sort of eerie constancy, like the world is just chock-a-block with Hitlers. The salient fact about Hitler, however, and the world situation in the 1930s, is that it was unusual time and Hitler an unusual person. The suggestion that we should make recourse to strategies that, allegedly, would have, in retrospect, have been optimal for coping with Hitler as our regular basis for dealing with foreign leaders who don't eagerly submit to American hegemonic aspirations is daft.
Matt, people ask me, how could you have ever supported this war? It was a crazy time in American life. Today, for example, we're around the house listening to Love is Dead, the 1996 classic from The Mr. T Experience, pop-punk favorites from my youth. The heart and soul of the Experience, of course, is Dr. Frank. Doctor Frank has a blog. Back in the day, it was full of posts like this:
It's too bad he hasn't been giving speeches like this all along, but it's welcome nonetheless. After weeks of "leaks" and trial balloons about proposed scenarios for post-Saddam Iraq, the administration seems to have, at last, committed itself to the pro-democracy, neo-con program, or at least something along those lines. At the very least, any further waffling, wobbling, or backtracking, any hint that our efforts at Liberation will be less than sincere or thorough, any nod to the stability-at-all-costs mantra of Foggy Bottom and the GHWB alumni, can now be criticized fairly powerfully with a playback of the President's own words.
You have to understand, this isn't a rightwing propagandist blogging here. It's a freaking punk rock star. And, yes, he concludes with a parenthetical "Of course, in practical terms, the bluster-o-meter matters much less than the fact that the French attempt to wound the US by bringing down the Blair government appears to have failed." Fuck France!
And, I suppose, in some sense invading another country for no reason at all is sort of the most punk rock thing ever. Uncritically accepting the statements of the nation's political leaders, though, isn't so punk. I should have listened to Green Day but everyone knows they sold out.
So, um, Belle Waring's right about this. What to make of, say, the Pussycat Dolls trying to market themselves as feminist (via Jessica)? Well, it shows that marketing people are clever yet unscrupulous.
Never forget this classic blog post in which Brendan Nyhan finds Charles Krauthammer using the same "appeasement" quotation in separate columns about Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
I by no means begrudge airport baggage screeners their newfound union rights. Still, the speed, alacrity, and daring with which the Democrats pushed forward on this issue does make a telling contrast with the parties sloth and timidity in taking the progressive side in other fights about national security issue. Just as during the 2002 Homeland Security debate, you see that the Democratic Party is very substantially the creature of public sector unions. When an issue is important to them, Democrats will really fight for it. Not just lip service -- they'll run meaningful political risks on behalf of the public sector unions.
To stop a war with Iraq? To halt torture? Illegal surveillance? Suddenly you see a lot less speed, a lot less determination, and a lot less backbone. Not that I begrudge the unions their influence, either. They won it fair and square -- with organizing, with money, with volunteers, with discipline, with clear requests, etc. As you see with any influential group, securing influence takes work. Sadly, there are virtually no institutions of any consequence organized around providing a progressive take on the substance -- as opposed to labor procedures -- of national security issues. And until that changes, you'll keep having what we have today; a Democratic Party with very clear ideas about whether or not airport screeners should be represented by unions, but very hazy ideas about how to deal with Iran.
Brendan Nyhan has a smart take on yesterday's bogus Times story about some of Barack Obama's investments that "raise questions" about this and that. In fact, once you read through the whole article then go back and read it again to try to make sense of it, you'll see that no questions are, in fact, raised. Instead, Barack Obama made some financial transactions that the Times has no evidence were improper and for which there does not appear to be any realistic motive for improper action (nobody, for example, profited financially from the transaction) and for which there are perfectly plausible explanations.
The Times reporter, in short, saw something that did arguably raise questions. He looked into it. He found nothing. Then rather than printing nothing -- since, after all, that's what he found -- he instead went to press with a story that "raises questions" -- a formulation that simply amounts to a presumption of guilt. It raises the question of when America's newspapers just threw in the towel and decided they had no real obligations to inform their readers rather than mislead them.
George Will, preternatural optimist, says the GOP has three good choices for president. What about the Terrible Troika's dubious commitment to conservatism? Well, Will argues, Ronald Reagan didn't have a conservative record as governor. I'm not sure how true this is. Nevertheless, it's a classic form of argument that proves too much. I mean, would Mario Cuomo have been the greatest conservative president of all time. His record was really unconservative.
Recall these arguments from 1999-2000. People would point out that Bush seemed plainly not up to the job of running the United States of America. Some observed that Harry Truman didn't seem up to the job either. Ergo, not being up to the job must be a good thing. Or something. But, no. It turns out that Bush just wasn't up for the job.
Back in 1993, Rudy Giuliani plays the family card, deploying Donna Hanover's love and affection for him and his legendary skills as a father for political gain:
Nowadays, of course, young Andrew Giuliani is a bit older and not on speaking terms with his father. The source of the fight seems to be that Rudy not only divorced Andrew's mother, but insisted on publicly humiliating her in that uniquely classy Giuliani way. Mitt Romney, famously, is the only practicing monogamist among the Three Stooges.
I've finally gotten the chance to get through Joseph Cirincione's report for the Center for American Progress on recommended Iran policy options. They come out in favor of a sensible strategy they call "contain and engage." The basic idea is that you maintain a running dialogue with Iran offering carrots in exchange for verifiable steps at disarmament, while simultaneously maintaining a running dialogue with America's main allies and the other major powers about ratcheting-up Iran's diplomatic and economic isolation. The idea is to ensure that the United States is consistently the reasonable party, consistently the one prepared to strike a deal, and therefore that international diplomatic momentum remains on our side.
Among sensible people this is one major school of thought. The other, represented by Flynt Leverett's late 2006 report for the Century Foundations holds that we should be aiming at a "grand bargain" to resolve all the outstanding bilateral issues. This is, obviously, an appealing vision. The Center's authors say they "agree with the vision of a 'grand bargain' outlined by Middle East expert and former Bush administration official Flynt Leverett, who argues that the resolution of the nuclear issue requires 'an overarching framework in which outstanding bilateral differences are resolved as a package'" but that they think this is "not practical." Leverett, by contrast, thinks it's not practical to separate the issues.
I have no idea how to decide who's right about that, but it's a pretty small difference at the end of the day, since "engage and contain" could easily become "grand bargain" if the "engage" track seemed headed in that direction. It would be nice to have sensible people running the country.
In the midst of yet another post on unions, Tyler Cowen observes: "By the standards of labor economics, it does not suffice to note that the 1950s had both a more equal income distribution and more unions, or to call Western Europe a kinder, gentler place. Those citations don't sort out cause and effect, and in fact we do have more advanced ways of scrutinizing the data."
Obviously, that is true. Equally obviously, it sounds bad to speak in a disparaging way about empirical studies. That said, the result of my meta-survey of the empirical economics literature on unions is that it's . . . rather murky. Under the circumstances, I'm really not sure there's anything wrong with the heuristic methods Cowen disparages here. High levels of unionization are associated with politico-economic orders that are congenial to those of us of a certain political persuasion. Strong unions are simply part of the social democratic issue suite; social democrats support strong unions, strong unions support social democracy, and strong unions are partially constitutive of social democratic politics and policies.
Efforts to empirically disentangle the precise nature of the interrelationships here are, of course, an interesting scholarly endeavor and I don't begrudge anyone for spending their time looking into it. As a matter of political commitment, though, there's great wisdom in the example of anti-union semi-liberal Mickey Kaus who wisely recognizes in his book that he's abandonned egalitarian politics as they are traditionally understood. Consequently, I'm not sure it's in any real way worthwhile for non-specialists to engage in this debate since I assume we can all do an adequate job of Googling to try to find papers that support our conclusions or asking readers with access to superior specialized search tools to help us out.
Jacob Weisberg has a very excellent column on "four unspeakable truths about Iraq" that, frankly, surprises me for making all four dovish truths about Iraq, without some token poke at liberals. I actually don't think his fourth truth is true, though:
fourth and final near-certainty, which is in some ways the hardest for politicians to admit, is that America is losing or has already lost the Iraq war. The United States is the strongest nation in the history of the world and does not think of itself as coming in second in two-way contests. When it does so, it is slow to accept that it has been beaten.
I really think this is wrong. We won the war in Iraq. Saddam Hussein and his regime were deposed. We installed a new regime. The Sunni Arab insurgency remains active and will continue to remain active for osme time, but shows no realistic capability of defeating the regime we installed. We won the war. This is not Vietnam where the VC and PRVN drove US forces from the country, toppled the US-backed regime in Saigon, and unified the country under control of the Communist Party.
The problem in Iraq is that, we won a hollow victory. Defeating Saddam and replacing him with a new regime based around exiled Shiite political parties has a negative impact on America's strategic position in the world. Even were Iraq to grow substantially less chaotic over the next 2-5 years this would continue to be the case. The win-lose frame, while factually wrong, is also politically counterproductive. As Weisberg indicates, voters are reluctant to declare defeat for understandable psychological reasons. But there's no need to do that here. It's the fact of American victory that makes further involvement so untenable -- this is what winning looks like and, frankly, it looks like shit; there's no earthly reason to keep doing this; becoming "more successful" at backing the Maliki government wouldn't accomplish anything.
That'll be my quote of the day, courtesy of a nice but clueless older man who stopped by the Black Cat around 7:30 to wonder why all these people were standing on line in the cold. We were there to get the last of the tickets (all the ones available through Ticketmaster had sold out in a flash) available for the Dismemberment Plan's two nights only charity reuinion non-tour. And it only took waiting around in low-thirties weather for a bit more than three hours for the tickets to wind up in my hands.
Sweet, sweet victory. Why they didn't schedule these dates for the larger (and, frankly, far superior in terms of acoustics and sight lines despite the larger size) 9:30 Club is just one of those things I'll have to ponder, I suppose.
The great leader Petraeus says the surge is so successful it may need to get surgier, with even more troops thrown into the mix. This is, I think, the trouble with trying to solve Iraq's problems through sheer force of numbers at this point; if there are signs of improving conditions does that mean you need more troops (in which case what are you achieving) or fewer troops (in which case the problems will just come back)? The American strategy for Iraq can't be that we need an endlessly escalating military presence forever.
Through no fault of anyone's in the military, meanwhile, the administration has managed to become totally confused about our objectives in the region, where we're no longer sure if we're fighting Iran or al-Qaeda, if we're encouraging or discouraging sectarian conflict, if we favor Sunnis or Shiites. Under the circumstances, we can't possibly be brokering a viable political settlement; we don't even know what our goals are.
U.S. Bombards Iraq with Arcade Fire Hype ‘Operation Relentless Overkill’ Pounds Insurgents
. . . But even as American cargo planes blanketed insurgent positions with reprints of Arcade Fire puff pieces from The New Yorker and The New York Times, Iraqi insurgents fiercely fought off the waves of relentless indie band hype. Hassan El-Medfaii, a leading insurgent in the southern city of Basra, said that despite the relentless carpet-bombing of gushing Arcade Fire reviews, he was resisting attempts to compel him to buy the over-praised new CD.
I know the Americans’ game, and I won’t fall for it,” Mr. El-Medfaii said. “They tried this a couple of years ago with The Strokes.”
As Henley concedes, Neon Bible is, however, actually really good. My tentative conclusion, however, is that it's a non-trivial step backwards from Funeral.
... that Scooter Libby shouldn't be pardoned? Because Charles Krauthammer really wants to see it happen. As an approach to national policy, doing the reverse of what Krauthammer recommends will get you 87 percent or so of the way to perfection.
Matt Welch has a great article in Reason about John McCain's frightening authoritarianism. But of course McCain isn't alone. Giuliani, to his credit, used to be pro-choice (now he's personally pro-life, but politically pro-choice, but legally committed to making it easier to ban abortions -- got that?) but just because someone's pro-choice and sort of in favor of tax cuts does not a friend of liberty make. Jim Sleeper reviews the record and worries that "a man who fought the inherent limits of his mayoral office as fanatically as Giuliani would construe presidential prerogatives so broadly he'd make George Bush’s notions of 'unitary' executive power seem soft." What's more:
At least, as U.S. Attorney, Giuliani served at the pleasure of the President and had to defer to federal judges. Were he the President, U.S. Attorneys would serve at his pleasure -- a dangerous arrangement in the wrong hands, we've learned -- and he'd pick the judges to whom prosecutors defer.
There are many reasons to like Giuliani, but his personal intolerance of any hint of disloyalty, his contempt for dissent, his corner-cutting executive excesses and long history of cronyism must and surely will be weighed in the equation. Jim Sleeper is no lefty. His concerns are serious ones in a period when the constitution has already been strained to near-breaking point.
Sleeper also observes that Fred Siegel, author of the embarrassingly worshipful Prince of the City, "wondered why, after Giuliani’s 1997 mayoral reelection, with the city buoyed by its new safety and economic success, he wasn’t 'able to turn his Churchillian political personality down a few notches.'" The answer, obvious to anyone less blinkered than Siegel, is that Giuliani couldn't tone his "Churchillian" personally down because he's a jerk which served him well in some respects but most certainly wasn't an administrative gambit, that's the only way he knows how to govern.
The real question at hand is what's the dumbest part of David Broder's column on the Bipartisan Policy Center being spearheaded by Bob Dole, Tom Daschle, George Mitchell, and Howard Baker. My vote is for this:
But beyond the specific policy ideas they may generate, the hope is that the sight of these four diverse characters and strong-minded leaders working together will serve as an example to current senators.
I'm no Senator, but here's my commitment to Broder and to everyone out there in the grant-writing community. If you want to give me "a staff of 20 and a budget of $7 million a year" I will gladly put partisanship aside and reach across the aisle for solutions. Yes, yes, it's true -- I'm that selfless. Specifcally, maybe me, Ezra, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam could all work together on a $7 million a year bipartisan blog operation. We'd each draw a modest $250,000 a year in salary, and deploy the other $6 million on operating expenses for the group including a really, really nice conference room for us to sit down in while we hash out points of consensus and seek to "synthesize the best suggestions on improving port security."
"The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends how this goes.
You might see calls? From whom?
"Congress abdicated its oversight responsibility," he says. "The press abdicated its responsibility, and the American people abdicated their responsibilities. Terror was on the minds of everyone, and nobody questioned anything, quite frankly."
Boy, it's too bad there wasn't someone like Chuck Hagel in congress to avoid this abdicating. Oh, wait, there was. He just . . . abdicated.
I mean, whatever, he's still good for a Republican and I hope he runs against the Three Stooges, but there's something pretty absurd about this pattern; Hagel talking about himself as if he doesn't know who he is or what job he has.
I Was Strapped With Gats When You Was Cuddling The Cabbage Patch
Good news for DC's wannabe gun owners (i.e., me) today, as a federal court rules that what amounts to a blanket ban on gun ownership in Washington violates the second amendment of the constitution. I was hoping to rush out somewhere and buy a gun (really!) but apparently I still can't get one: "The court's ruling only clarifies some constitutional points and orders a lower court to allow a suit filed by Dick Heller, one of the appellants, to move forward." Oy.
This is not, incidentally, a tongue-in-cheek post. My feeling is that DC law has been working as hard as possible for the past few decades to try and demonstrate the maxim that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. I don't write about this issue much because, hey, I don't want to be a wanker, but you can certainly mark me down as glad that Democrats seem to have dropped gun control as a cause here in the 21st century.
Via Brian Doherty, the top twenty comic book weapons, notably for our purposes for including a good description of the Green Lantern Power Ring (#2 on the list): "Each Green Lantern possesses a power ring that gives the user great control over the physical world as long as the wielder has sufficient willpower. The user can create damn near anything from the green energy packed in that tiny ring."
Chris Broussard offers his top ten NBA nicknames. It's Insider content, so I'll summarize:
Doctor J
Magic Johnson
Air Jordan
Earl the Pearl Monroe
Human Highlight Film
Pistol Pete
Sir Charles
King James
Hakeem the Dream
The Reign Man (apparently, this is Shawn Kemp)
Honorable mention goes to The Matrix, The Answer, Half Man / Half Amazing, The Admiral, Muggsy (Bogues), Diesel, and Clyde (Walt Frazier). This list seems somewhat confused to me. Air Jordan was a fantastic player, but a totally forgettable nickname. If, for example, that was the nickname of the fourth-best shooting guard of the mid-1990s would anyone think it noteworthy today? Frankly, I doubt it. Ironically, I think the Jordan derivative "Air Canada" for Vince Carter is both better than Jordan's nickname and better than Half Man / Half Amazing. Somehow, my favorite current NBA nickname -- The Truth -- has gone missing from this list. Human Highlight Film (I'd thought this was reel) is actually a downright bad nickname. It's too long and, really, you'd feel like an idiot actually saying it -- 'Nique deserves better than that.
It seems to me that Texas NBA fans need to get better at devising nicknames. Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, Yao Ming, Tracy McGrady, Dirk Nowitzki, and Josh Howard are all laboring away without a single cool nickname among them.
Hawkish pro-Israel lawmakers are pushing to strike a provision slated for the war spending bill that would, with some exceptions, require the president to seek congressional approval before using military force in Iran.
The influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee also is working to keep the language out, said an aide to a pro-Israel lawmaker.
As readers will know, I had absolutely nothing to do with this, but MyDD and a coalition of local blogs appear to have succeeded in their efforts to get the Nevada Democratic Party to can the idea of a Fox News-sponsored debate. This goes to show, as with the Sinclair Broadcasting affair from a while back, that social capital really is a powerful thing . . . relativel small numbers of people can, if properly organized and energized, exercise a great deal of influence over fairly powerful institutions. One of the big problems in contemporary America is that vast swathes of civil society have really sort of withered away over the past few decades, and the internet's greatest promise is the possibility of rebuilding it.
My less political friends were mostly focused on the gay undertones, but from a foreign policy perspective it's hard to avoid noticing that this is a movie wherein your heros battle the insidious forces of Iran Persia. At one point, Xerxes even unleashes a rhinoscerous of mass destruction. Clearly, in the film's mythic retelling of the Thermopylae story, the Spartans are not only the heros but they are, in an important sense, us. We all living in the west are, or so the story goes, the heirs to Greek culture and civilization which was saved that day against in battle against the Asiatic hordes.
On another level, however, the "thousand nations of the Persian Empire" were the superpower of their day, like the United States. The Spartan rhetoric refers to "freedom" but it is not the liberty of the moderns for which they speak. In conventional terms, Xerxes' subjects were probably freer than those under Leonidas' rule. Rather, the Spartans fight for the freedom of Sparta the freedom of Greece, for the self-determination and autonomy of their people, and they fight for it to the point of irrationality and suicide. The impulse has more in common with, say, Hugo Chavez' defiance of the superpower next door or Palestinians detonating a car bomb at a West Bank checkpoint than it does with anything in contemporary American policy.
As it happens, the filmmakers themselves appear to have no particular message in mind as they were working on the movie which is, probably for the best. Qua movie review I'll just say that 300, while certainly neat, is in every way inferior to Sin City.
UPDATE: A commenter urges me to say something about the film's racism. I think "Orientalism" may be the term we're looking for here. Certainly, on a not-very-subtle level the semiotics here are indicating that the Middle East is populated by people who are, at best, partially human. This is taken over directly from the comic book but somehow amped-up during adaptation.
Brad DeLong passes on on an amusing remark from Robert Solow: "Well, if everything is politically impossible except what we have now, we could have saved a lot of time here."
So true. Meaningful political change is rarely "politically possible" in the sense that there is some obvious method through which the existing constellation of forces could easily bring it about. If it were, after all, it would have happened already. Which isn't to say it's a good idea to attempt the impossible -- if you do, you'll probably fail. But if nobody ever tried to do anything that was probably doomed to failure, then nothing would ever happen.
I sort of agree with this Ivestor's Business Daily editorial calling for more H-1B visa slots. I actually, however, agree much more with the logic than with the specific conclusion, since the H-1B program has some problems. The issue, at the end of the day, is that the United States should be allowing many, many, many more high-skill immigrants to enter the country. Such immigration has all the benefits of our current high levels of low-skill immigration (good for overall economic growth, good for the immigrants, etc.) but absolutely none of the costs in terms of increased inequality.
Indeed, quite the reverse -- high-skill immigration would make America more egalitarian. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, engineers, accounts, political pundits, professors, etc., we should be encouraging these people to come to our shores.
Former John McCain superfan Jonathan Chait has had enough and pens a hilarious column arguing that his further hero has now gone "to the dark side." I'm a little uncertain as to what's changed Chait's mind since he was arguing about a year ago that McCain's rightward shift was fake and the "real" John McCain was the liberal one he discerned back in the day.
For my money, I regard it as unlikely that a US Senator experienced two ideological conversions during the 2000-2005 period. The best sense I can make of McCain is that outside of his fanatical commitment to militarism, he doesn't have especially strong views on anything. One thing he's never been is the kind of politician I would be enthusiastic about. In Chait's original pro-McCain article, he wrote "After the Democratic Leadership Council's Will Marshall met to court him, McCain remarked, 'I was struck by how much we were in common.'" That I found plausible. The kind of Democrat who, like Will Marshall, loves militarism, doesn't care about economic inequality or poverty, and regards "social issues" as primarily an electoral headache rather than causes worth fighting for probably did have a lot in common with McCain's 2001-2003 era persona.
If I were the kind of conservative (as most soi disant conservatives these days seem to be) inclined to regard "neo-Reaganite" foreign policy as an important plank of conservatism, I think McCain would be my favorite of the three stooges, since his commitment to that seems quite firm and principled. McCain's made it clear that he doesn't like cultural conservatives but he's almost invariably been willing to vote the way they want. His thinking about economics seems confused more than anything else, but he'd probaby veto anything Democrats wanted to do that involved spending money.
Jerome Armstrong writes that Hillary Clinton has a clear lead in New Hampshire organizing, which I think is to be expected, but that even given expectations it's impressively clear. Edwards also has some substantial organization there, but Barack Obama has fallen behind. I was given a similar account at a level that was, frankly, way beyond my ability to comprehend, of the state of play in South Carolina.
I don't have a really strong opinion as to whether or not 2008 is likely to follow the 2004 pattern, but it is worth recalling that the way '04 worked essentially nothing mattered beyond the outcomes in Iowa and New Hampshire and that when it comes to winning those primaries ground organizing is more-or-less king.
Kevin Drum remarks a bit on the perennial unpopularity of self-identifying as a "liberal" no matter how popular liberal policies may or may not be. I now can't find the link, but I think one of the most telling pieces of data I ever saw on this was something that broke ideological self-identification down by race. Self-identifying as a liberal turned out to be less popular among African-Americans than it is among white Americans. This even though everyone knows that African-Americans are much more likely to vote for Democratic candidates and have more left-wing views than white people on most issues.
Mark Kleiman points out that Democrats can pass a bill stipulating that "no funds" be used to issue a pardon in violation of this guideline from the Pardon Attorney's office:
No petition for pardon should be filed until the expiration of a waiting period of at least five years after the date of the release of the petitioner from confinement or, in case no prison sentence was imposed, until the expiration of a period of at least five years after the date of the conviction of the petitioner. Generally, no petition should be submitted by a person who is on probation, parole, or supervised release.
That would, of course, have the effect of preventing Bush from pardoning Scooter Libby. Republicans could, clearly, filibuster any such bill. But from where I sit, that's a political fight Democrats would like to have on their hands. First Pete Domenici politicizes corruption investigations, then he mounts filibusters to prevent justice being done to felons inside the Bush administration, etc.
Tony Smith has a pretty great article in today's Post. I'm just going to quote a bunch of it:
Iraq had flustered the congressional Democrats because Democrats don't have an agreed position on what America's role in the world should be. They want to change the Bush administration's policy in Iraq without discussing the underlying ideas that produced it. And although they now cast themselves as alternatives to President Bush, the fact is that prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different from the Bush-Cheney doctrine.
Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.
But without a coherent alternative to the Bush doctrine, with its confidence in America's military preeminence and the global appeal of "free market democracy," the Democrats' midterm victory may not be repeated in November 2008. Or, if the Democrats do win in 2008, they could remain staked to a vision of a Pax Americana strikingly reminiscent of Bush's. . . .
The early positions of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates illustrate their party's problem. The front-runner, Hillary Clinton, has not moved from her traditional support of the DLC's basic position -- she criticizes the conduct of the war, but not the idea of the war. Former senator John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama are more outspoken; both call the war a serious mistake, but neither has articulated a vision for a more modest U.S. role in the world generally.
It isn't easy to offer a true alternative. The challenges to world order are many, as are the influential special interests in this country that want an aggressive policy: globalizing corporations, the military-industrial complex, the pro-Israel lobbies, those who covet Middle Eastern oil. The nationalist conviction that we are indeed "the indispensable nation" will continue to tempt our leaders to overplay their hand. The danger lies in believing that our power is beyond challenge, that the righteousness of our goals is beyond question and that the real task is not to reformulate our role in the world so much as to assert more effectively a global American peace.
I have to say, I really think more pro-lifers should do blog posts spelling out the close connections between opposition to abortion rights and opposition to contraceptives generally. While I obviously disagree with the "double no" conclusion of Katherine Jean-Lopez and the Pope, I agree with them about the connectedness of these issues and I'm fairly confident that the more people who see the linkage, the less viable pro-life politics will become.
The National Assocation of Evangelicals has rebuffed an effort by James Dobson and other old guard preachers-slash-GOP-operatives to get the NAE to drop a "creation care" plank expressing the need to combat global warming and return to an exclusive focus on banning abortions and cutting taxes.
While The Weekly Standard has to make do with using Frederick Kagan's wife to write articles proclaiming the Kagan surge plan a success, The Washington Post believes in integrity and trots out brother Robert Kagan to do it instead. Maybe someday we can get Donald Kagan's take on all this. If only the whole world were made up of members of the Kagan family, then maybe George W. Bush would be a really popular president.
At any rate, you're not supposed to mention Robert Kagan in polite professional punditry circles without observing that he's much smarter and a much more honest writer than your average neocon. This pearl of wisdom even has the virtue of being true. Sadly, as Glenn Greenwald exhaustively demonstrates, this really isn't saying very much. For a neocon, he has a great analytic track record on Iraq, which means his track record is horrible rather than, say, horrifyingly horrible. That he gets to slander his employers at the Post in the first graf of his terrible column merely demonstrates how nice it must be to be a conservative . . . well-worked refs are the best refs to have.
Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt helpfully publishes under his own byline to assure us that dissent from the anti-Putin line that dominates the DC conventional wisdom reflects hatred of America. In fact, he's missing the point. "Who lost Russia? As the world's biggest country backslides ever more quickly into authoritarianism," Hiatt writes, "the answer you hear increasingly is: the United States."
Ann Hulbert profiles the views of persons given the unfortunate label "Generation Next," those of us between the ages of 18-25. She says that "what makes Gen Nexters sui generis — and perhaps more mysterious than their elders appreciate — are their views on two divisive social topics, abortion and gay marriage." In particular, "Young Americans, it turns out, are unexpectedly conservative on abortion but notably liberal on gay marriage."
Given that 18- to 25-year-olds are the least Republican generation (35 percent) and less religious than their elders (with 20 percent of them professing no religion or atheism or agnosticism), it is curious that on abortion they are slightly to the right of the general public. Roughly a third of Gen Nexters endorse making abortion generally available, half support limits and 15 percent favor an outright ban. By contrast, 35 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds support readily available abortions. On gay marriage, there was not much of a generation gap in the 1980s, but now Gen Nexters stand out as more favorably disposed than the rest of the country. Almost half of them approve, compared with under a third of those over 25.
There seems to be more bark than bite on that abortion result. "Roughly a third" and "35 percent" are very similar numbers when you're talking about statistical surveys with margins of error. Hulbert then starts offering a lot of speculative thinking about what accounts for "Generation Next" opinion on this and that. I note that, like many authors, Hulbert seems to both assume that the Generation Next cohort is demographically identical to the Baby Boom cohort except for age. Relatedly, the background assumption of her speculation seems to be that differences in opinion are accounted for by the fact that white middle class young people have different views about things than do white middle class older people.
In fact, as you can read here (PDF) the median age of non-hispanic white Americans is 40.3, of African-Americans is 30.9, of Asian Americans is 34.5 and of Hispanics is 27.2 -- these are big differences. Thus, when you compare 18-25 year-olds to 50-64 year-olds you're comparing a youth cohort that's substantially less white than your middle-aged cohort which, all on its own, can make a big difference without anyone necessarily "disagreeing with their parents" about anything. Some parents have more children than others. This also seems to indicate that occassionally voiced fears (or hopes) that highly religious conservative parents will wind up outbreeding liberals is unwarranted.
I'd read David Brooks' critique; I'd read Michael Agger's defense, but today I think I met my very first real-life Alternamom ("hipster mom" is the term I would have used). Sporting stylish plastic frames, all-black attire, and a stroller that appears to have been sent from the future, here she is in 14U my very own hip U Street hang-out. Insofar as this social trend seems likely to result in more babies crying while I try to get my blog on, I have to say I agree with Brooks. Thank the lord for my Etymotics 6i earphones.
UPDATE:This is the stroller. "Popular with celebrities and the uber rich" according to the friend who tipped me off to its identity. I kind of want one. Could maybe use it to carry groceries?
To try to clarify a point from my post on Vladimir Putin, I don't really think there's anything wrong with the American political elite being nostalgic for the international climate of the 1990s and the way it was more friendly to the unfettered exercise of American power.
Nevertheless, people -- including political elites -- ought to understand that that was an anomolous situation and that moment has passed. It happens to be the case that China and Iran are dictatorships while Venezuela and Russia are illiberal plebiscitary regimes but this has relatively little to do with America's policy disagreements with them. No conceivable set of domestic political arrangements is going to change the fact that the Russian government wants to ensure that governments in the "near abroad" will be friendly to Russian interests (think of US policy toward Central America and the Carribbean), that China wants to be a great power on a par with the USA, that Iran thinks it should be a leading regional power, or that Latin Americans resent American political and economic domination of the Western Hemisphere. Grown-up policy recognizes that countries are going to have interests and desires that can't be wished away by hoping for democracy and that the essence of foreign policy is finding ways to reconcile those interests with our own priorities rather than whining about the fact that very few countries are interested in becoming Japan-style client states unless they really have no choice in the matter.
The Wizards' loss to the Knicks was a bitter pill, but knowing the 'zards played a small role in generating ephemeral improvement, saving Isiah Thomas' job, and thus ensuring New York hoops fans years of further frustration is prize enough.
Rudy Giuliani's strategy for coping with his liberal record on cultural issues seems to be to agree to appoint very conservative judges to the federal bench. My guess is that the problem here is that, in light of his record (indeed, in light of his recordon judicial appointments) is going to have to be much more explicit about his desire to appoint abortion-banning judges than someone with a pro-life record would. Consequently, he might wind up actually creating a bigger problem for himself with pro-choice moderates than a pro-lifer willing to be vague (see, e.g., Bush, George W.) has.
NASA can find and track most of the nearby asteroids that could hit and damage the Earth, but there is not enough money in its budget to finish the project within a 15-year deadline mandated by Congress, according to an agency report released Friday.
Link. Program costs for doing this properly would be not-very-high in the scheme of things. Instead, we're getting a Moon base.
Eric Neel says he respects the Mavericks but just can't fall in love with them as a great team. He blames Mark Cuban. Closer to the mark, I think, I saw Skip Bayless on ESPN this afternoon talking about "so-called superstar Dirk Nowitzki." The correct term for that sentiment is "crazy." Dirk is averaging over 25 points per game while shooting 50 percent from the field and over 90 percent from the line (42 percent from beyond the arc, thank you very much). Have I mentioned that he's seven feet tall and snags 9.5 rebounds per game? Three and a half assists isn't terrible, either. Oh, and Dallas plays with the league's third-slowest pace, depressing all of his numbers.
There is, in short, an irrational reluctance to embrace Nowitzki as a superstar. People seem almost resigned to him winning the MVP rather than celebrating his greatness. This, even though it's actually quite rare for the proverbial "best player on the best team" to also make an extremely strong case that he's having the best individual statistical season in the league. Is it because he's German? Because it seems unfair for a seven footer to have such a sweet shot? Who knows? Frankly, I feel it too.
A mysterious coalition of conservative Democrats and "lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel" have persuaded the party that it would be a mistake to flex some legislative muscles and make an effort to constrain the Bush administration's ability to take the country into a war with Iran. Since history has, after all, shown that when granted broad military authority Bush usually uses it wisely as a subtle negotiating tool and with brilliant results. Or something.
To state the obvious, while Israel and the United States are different countries with presumptively different interests, on really big region-wide issues one doesn't really see a ton of divergence. Insofar as letting a reckless and incompetent administration guided by a blinkered ideology have a free hand to launch a misguided war with Iran is bad for the United States it's also not going to end well for Israel.
UPDATE: Let me be clearer about the point of convergence. My analysis of the situation is that bombing Iran is not merely a poor policy option all things considered, but is likely to prove very ineffective at delaying Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon (physical damage done to the program will be undone by diplomatic damage done to the fairly successful international effort to curb Iranian acquisitions). Insofar as this is correct, we're not going to be doing Israel any favors by bombing. Obviously, the myth of the Osirak raid has even more power in Israeli politics than in US politics, so Israeli politicians don't necessarily see it that way, but they're still mistaken.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Cheney's remarks prove that "the administration's answer to continuing violence in Iraq is more troops and more treasure from the American people."
I still don't feel that Democrats have located the appropriately disrespectful tone for responding to Cheney's foreign policy pearls of wisdom. If David Duke were to slam Pelosi as insufficiently committed to white supremacy, she wouldn't start quibbling with him. Getting smeared by Cheney isn't the same as that (but let him complain then come back with, sorry, it's easy to get confused when you're talking about one of congress' foremost supporters of the apartheid regime in South Africa), but it's still a situation where his attacks should be worn as a badge of honor. Substantively, the man is a horror. Conveniently, he's also wildly unpopular. I mean, he's got to be one of the least-popular major American political figures ever. It seems to me that "When Dick Cheney criticizes the House Democrats, that's how we know we must be doing something right" is along the right lines. I mean, I think the period during which Cheney and his "gravitas" were well-respected around the nation is long behind us at this point.
Some people probably find this topic obscure and pointless, but even though "neoliberalism" sort of names nothing and sort of names everything, I think it's actually a pretty important topic. And Mickey Kaus makes an important point about it:
While it's true that Cheney is wildly unpopular, he's actually not any more unpopular than President Bush at this point. For instance, the latest CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll (March 9-11) has job approval for Bush at 37 percent and Cheney at 34 percent. In part, that's a reflection of the fact that President Bush's approval is heavily concentrated among conservatives, who at this point may like Cheney more than Bush. More importantly, Bush is the most unpopular president at this point in his term since Harry Truman in 1951. It would be hard for Cheney to do much worse.
I didn't know that. Cheney's historically been less popular than Bush, so I assumed that as Bush sunk into the thirties Cheney would dip down into the twenties. Apparently, though, about a third of the country is composed of GOP dead-enders who won't turn on either man come what may. The larger point stands. Cheney -- and, it seems, Bush -- have dropped down to pathetic levels of unpopularity and there's no reason for political timidity whatsoever in responding to attacks they level.
UPDATE: Haggai points out that a New York Times poll has Cheney at a ridiculous 18 percent.
UPDATE II: In update to his post, Nyhan notes that there's a question-wording difference. The Times asked about favorability whereas the other poll was about job approval. The Bush-Cheney gap appears to exist in favorability questions, but increasingly not in job approval ones.
I keep forgetting that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has for some reason been allowed to re-invent himself as a fake expert on the national security issues of the contemporary Middle East. Elsewhere in that issue of Democracy, however, you'll find Mark Schmitt's smart take on the failures of the 1990s-vintage campaign finance reform movement and charting a course for more fruitful action in the future.
I think what I agree with most is the section in page three which points out the limits of "corruption and the appearance of corruption" as the rationale for reform. Those are important values, of course. But one can't talk seriously about election rules without also considering values like trying to preserve some measure of political equality. And perhaps most important of all, trying to ensure that competitive elections even happen in the first place. The best cure for corruption (or, indeed, the appearance of corruption) is almost certainly for elected officials to regularly face vigorous challengers. That means the emphasis has to less be on "getting the money out of politics" than on getting at least some political money into the hands of ordinary people.
One astounding fact I notice each year as "March Madness" descends upon is that people who cover the NBA appear to believe that NBA GMs will be non-trivially swayed in their drafting decisions by team success enjoyed by amateur athletes playing in a single-elimination tournament. I think that's crazy. Precisely what's fun about the NCAA Tournament -- what puts the madness into March -- is that the tournament format makes the ultimate outcomes fairly random. It might make some sense to super-weight a player's individual performance during the Tournament since, presumably, you're getting a look at how the guy responds to pressure and to a somewhat more consistent level of competition than you see in the regular season. But Chad Ford says that "if Texas A&M struggles early, [Acie Law] could slide behind all of the freshmen point guards with NBA potential" and that "if [Mike Conley] can help lead Ohio State to a NCAA title as a freshman, a number of GMs will come calling in the mid-to- late first round."
It's a six-round single-elimination tournament! A team that wins 89 percent of the time wins six in a row less than half the time. This just can't be your decisive factor in assessing whether Law is better than Conley. TNR has a March Madness blog, incidentally, for tournament coverage. I'll be rooting for Texas out of deference to the roommate and because I saw Kevin Durant play live in high school so I feel like I discovered him even though every scout in the country already knew all about him.
As I believe I've acknowledged, I wrote some pretty dumb things back in the day. Nevertheless, I never came even remotely close to writing anything as inane as this: "Even after September 11th, Marvel Comics and other publishers are disseminating comic books that actively promote a destructive cynicism and mistrust of the United States Government." That was April 2003. Shockingly, though, Cliff May is actually bragging about his small role in bringing that pearl of wisdom to light. He must really not like the Ultimates 2 story arc.
Everyone here reads TPM, right? I don't actually need to say anything about the Washington Postblockbuster pointing out that several administration officials have been lying to congress about the sacked US Attorneys.
I'm not qualified to fully assess the scientific accuracy of An Inconvenient Truth, but unlike some New York Times reporters I know the difference between science and social science. To wit, the Gray Lady:
“He’s a very polarizing figure in the science community,” said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. “Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore.”
Roger Pielke, Jr. isn't an environmental scientist. Read his about me page (emphasis added):
I am currently a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. At CU, I am also a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. Before coming to CU in 2001, I spent 8 years as a staff scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in their Environmental and Societal Impacts Group (now called ISSE). I have a B.A. in mathematics, an M.A. in public policy and a Ph.D. in political science, all from the University of Colorado.
New Dem Dispatch on Iran from the DLC calls for "Effective diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force." Obviously, I think it's the case that diplomacy can be rendered more effective through credible threats of force. Unfortunately, an awful lot of people -- especially hawkish Democrats seeking out a sensible middle ground here -- seem slightly confused about the concept of credibility. The credibility of a threat is overwhelmingly an objective property of the threat, and not something that's seriously altered by, say, noting that "all options are on the table." Thus, important aspects of the wisdom of threatening to use force against Iran actually wind up reducing to the wisdom of actually using force against Iran. Or, in the immortal words of Outkast, "don't pull that thang out, unless you plan to bang."
The reason people in the sensible center don't think we should just go bomb Iran next week is that it's quite unclear how much this would really set the nuclear program back, while reasonably clear that it would improve Iran's diplomatic situation and strengthen the hand of the hardliners at home. If I thought (as, say, Reuel Marc Gerecht does) that was wrong; if I thought airstrikes would significantly set back the Iranian program, weaken the Iranian regime, and leave our diplomatic efforts against Iran intact, then it would seem to me that the case for actually bombing after a period of curt diplomacy ("verifiably disarm or we'll bomb you") would be strong. But if you don't believe that -- and I think the sensible center mostly doesn't -- then the threat isn't credible. If a bombing campaign would do more to strengthen the regime and relax its growing diplomatic isolation than it would to set back the nuclear program, then the regime would be relatively eager for us to bomb them. Insofar as they think counterproductive airstrikes are the likely alternative to negotiations, they're less -- not more -- likely to negotiate.
That's the crux of the matter. Credible threats are good. But the threats must actually be credible. If your threat is credible, you can make it clearly and plainly. But it's clear from the overall policy proposal that the DLC (rightly) doesn't regard our threats as very credible. As they say, "our security goals can best be advanced by maintaining a united front with leading powers and world bodies that share our interest in stemming nuclear proliferation and discrediting terrorism." But if the threat's not credible, you're best off not making the threat; you can't magically turn a non-credible threat into a credible one by wishing.
Why on earth would Alberto Gonzalez literally use the phrase "mistakes were made" with reference to sacking US Attorneys unwilling to play partisan politics with the law -- is he trying to look guilty? Bitter, maybe, that he didn't get that SCOTUS seat he thought he was in for?
In other unwise statements news, I haven't gotten to this part of my review copy of Bob Shrum's memoir yet, but even the chapter near the beginning about when Shrum was on the college debate team kind of makes him seem loathesome. And this is to say nothing of the man's weird hatred of Jimmy Carter.
Good post from Eric Martin. Good joke from Jim Henley: "Eric Martin discovers a curious fact: if locals bomb foreign troops when there are no American reporters around to hear it, it still makes a guerrilla war." The point being that conquering foreigners and reconstructing their political arrangements is objectively difficult, and not just something rendered hard by the liberals in the MSM.
A lot of people look at the No Child Left Behind Act's requirement of "100 proficiency" and smell a rat; an obviously impossible goal. I would read Richard Rothstein's "'Proficiency for All': An Oxymoron" for a detailed explication of this view. Then many, including Kevin Drum, move from this to a paranoid account of the motives behind the provision. "What incentive does anyone have to label 99% of America's public schools as failures?" he asks, "That's crazy, isn't it?"
Answer: Anyone who wants the public to believe that public schools are failures. This would primarily consist of conservatives who want to break teachers unions and evangelicals who want to build political momentum for private school vouchers. The whole point of NCLB for these people is to make sure that as many public schools as possible are officially deemed failures.
I'll happily agree that this provision seems somewhat ill-advised to me. However, the "secret plot to destroy public schools" account of the whole point of NCLB has some problems. Does Kevin really expect me to believe that this is what Ted Kennedy and George Miller, the law's leading Democratic supporters in the Senate and the House, are up to? These are big-time liberals. Perhaps they're wrong -- Kennedy's certainly not above criticism -- but it's absurd to think that they're leading agents behind an enterprise whose whole point is to dismantle the public school system.
The NAE board endorsed "An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in An Age of Terror." The 18-page document, which was produced by Evangelicals for Human Rights and can be viewed at www.evangelicalsforhumanrights.org, states: "From a Christian perspective, every human life is sacred. Recognition of this transcendent moral dignity is non-negotiable for us as evangelical Christians in every area of life, including our assessment of public policies. We write this declaration to affirm our support for detainee human rights and opposition to any resort to torture."
The document affirms the doctrine that "United States law and military doctrine has banned the resort to torture or cruel and degrading treatment. Tragically, documented cases of torture and inhumane and cruel behavior have occurred at various sites in the war on terror, and current law opens procedural loopholes for more to continue. We commend the Pentagon's revised Army Field Manual for clearly banning such acts, and urge that this ban extend to every sector of the United States government without exception, including our intelligence agencies."
That's via Mark Kleiman. The full statement is here in PDF. The NAE board also recently flipped off Dobson et. al. when they tried to excommunicate a newer generation of leaders who decided to stray from some elements of Republican Party orthodoxy. And good for them. The correlation in this country between observant Christianity and political support for agenda of aggressive warfare, torture, etc. has been notably dissonant in recent years. Now, perhaps, things are turning around.
John Judis makes the point that none of the major presidential candidates have any real foreign policy experience. He also makes the argument that this actually matters, that the post-war presidents with relevant experience -- Eisenhower, Nixon, H.W. Bush -- managed to avoid the sort of early blunders that he says characterized other leaders:
John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton eventually enjoyed considerable success, but they began poorly--Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs, Reagan in Lebanon, and Clinton in Somalia, Tokyo, and the Balkans. Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush were disastrous flops, and Jimmy Carter (except for Camp David) floundered.
I'm not 100 percent sure on this. Carter, it seems to me, floundered more domestically than abroad. And in foreign policy terms floundered more later than early. His big triumph at Camp David came before his flounder-like handling of the Iranian Revolution. But I think there's something to it. Inexperienced candidates tend to make reference to the fact that they'll be backstopped by veteran advisors and professionals which is, of course, true. The trouble is that what inexperienced presidents-elect normally do is decide that they want to keep their options open and parcel out the top jobs such that all the major strains of thought present within his party are represented at a high level. This, in turn, tends to lead to some of the floundering. People with conflicting visions get appointed because the president doesn't have a clear vision of his own, and then the president approaches his early big decisions as a personnel management issue (how do I keep the whole team on board) rather than figuring it out.
I think there's potentially a real problem here. A Democrat taking office in 2009 is going to face an ongoing national security crisis -- call it "the Bush administration legacy" -- from Day One. And, unfortunately, it's not going to be possible to just press a button and undo it all.
Someone should probably explain to Jonah Goldberg the difference between a district attorney and a US attorney. That said, a slightly off-message point about this scandal. Now that it's happened, doesn't this seem like a good time to reconsider whether it really makes sense to organize federal prosecutions in this manner? As we're seeing here, a President of the United States who treats his US Attorneys like run-of-the-mill political appointees is doing something dangerous and disturbing. We don't want -- with good reason -- the people in those jobs to think of themselves as part of the president's team. They're supposed to behave as agents of the state and of the law rather than as agents of the political regime of the moment.
But at the same time, they . . . formally are just political appointees. Their independence rests on a combination of tradition, and then the secondary tradition that the candidates are actually chosen not by the president but by the local senator. Norms, however, can be broken, as we're seeing at the moment. Mightn't it make more sense to actually change how this system works to insulate people in those positions from day-to-day politics to a greater extent?
So this is pretty weird. Jim Henley did a post noting that Iraq doesn't provide the best circumstances for whoring or making time with the local girls, wondering who, if anyone, American troops were having sex with. He handed the assignment off to Spencer Ackerman, who's in Iraq at the moment. Coincidentally, Spencer was present for a meeting between an Iraqi police commander and a US army officer during which the Iraqi had the exact same question.
The official answer turns out to be that our troops aren't having any sex at all, but it doesn't seem especially plausible that this rule is being met with 100 percent compliance.
Good on him -- pissed off an AIPAC audience by noting that Palestians are suffering a lot under occupation. Gutsy. And, obviously, true. I was trying to think of the last time someone said something similar to a similar audience, but what I came up with was . . . Paul Wolfowitz, which isn't the most flattering comparison.
UPDATE: Absurdly, meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi seems to have gotten booed for . . . observing that the Iraq War has failed. You would think pro-Israel advocates would be willing to recognize basic accurate facts about events in the region.
Kevin Drum responds to my earlier post. I think Kevin Carey provides further persuasive evidence in favor of the anti-paranoid position. In brief, there are lots of people out there who argue in favor of privatizing primary and secondary education in America. You don't see those people praising NCLB very much. Ergo, it seems very unlikely that NCLB is a secret plot to privatize the American school system.
UPDATE:Even more from Andrew Rotherham. I should say that I think one could fairly say that there seems to me to be a certian objectionable arrogance in the way important aspects of a major education reform seem to rely on wink-nod understandings among insiders, things not meaning what they seem to mean, issues being kicked down the road in odd ways, etc. To see politicians actually moving toward dismantling a public school system, though, you need to look to the Utah where they're adopting the most comprehensive voucher plan ever seen. These are, recall, the same Utah legislators who hate NCLB.
I had really thought Jon Chait's initial reply to Joe Lieberman's deranged complaint that "there is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism" was perfectly adequate, but Jonah Goldberg seems interested in this goofy debate perhaps we should turn the question around: Why does opposition to the anti-war movement inspire greater passion among conservatives than does opposition to Islamist extremism?
In my opinion, it's a mixed bag of motives. Hating liberals has been a core element of American conservatism since long before anyone knew or cared what Islamist extremism was. What's more, a lot of conservatives are greedy. Write a book about how Hillary Clinton is like Musolini and you might sell some copies; get paid. Of course, that doesn't really excuse it since the reason liberal-bashing books sell better than earnest tomes about counterterrorism policy is, precisely, that conservatives are more emotionally invested in liberal-bashing than in opposing Islamism. There's also the fact that your average conservative probably doesn't know any radical Islamists personally, so they kind of carry a psychological grudge against liberals that they don't share with regard to Islamist extremists.
More women than ever on Forbes' billionaires list. The Independent Women's Forum sees "irrefutable proof that women don’t need government programs to help them make it in the business world—a fact our friends at NOW and similar organizations are unwilling to admit." Ann Friedman, by contrast, actually read the list and noticed that "every woman in the top 100 has inherited her wealth, not shattered the glass ceiling to earn her millions."
Further down the list, it's true, you do find self-made female billionaires like J.K. Rowling and Oprah Winfrey. But, again, the success of celebrity entertainers actually says nothing about whether or not women face unfair disadvantages in the business world writ large.
This is really absurd. Democratic Pollster Doug Schoen goes on Warren Olney's NPR show to back Fox News and talk smack about the netroots. As Matt Stoller points out he manages not to mention during this that he's actually a paid contributor to Fox News. He's also business partners with Mark Penn, pollster to Hillary Clinton and the DLC.
It's a dirty, dirty businss out there in the consulting world. Sundry "strategists" appear on television, disclosing neither their business relationships with candidates nor their business relationships with corporate clients nor, in this case, their business relationships with conservative media outlets. And yet, any candidate who the consultants don't like will have a heck of a hard time getting DSCC or DCCC support for his campaigns. So everybody just plays along quietly.
Suns pull out a double OT win thanks to a . . . brilliant defensive play by Steve Nash? Weird. But what an awesome game. There's gonna be a lot of must-see games in the Western Conference playoffs this year which, thanks to time zones, is going to mean little sleep for me.
Hillary Clinton is, I think, to be congratulated for stating reasonably clearly that her vision of "bringing the troops home" from Iraq after she becomes president doesn't actually entail our troops not being in Iraq. Instead, The New York Times reports, "she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military." The troops will be brought home only in the sense that "Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence -- even if it descended into ethnic cleansing."
If Clinton really lived up to her reputation as an unusually "calculating" politician, I think she would have simply kept this under wraps until after the primaries (or maybe even after the general election) but most of the time she's pretty clear about where she stands. It's just not where I stand. I'd be interested in hearing what Edwards, Obama, and Richardson think about this. My impression is that most of what passes for the Democratic national security establishment agrees with Clinton.
Julian Sanchez says the "collective right" interpretation of the second amendment doesn't make sense. And, indeed, it doesn't really. But then again, neither does the "individual right" reading which would leave the right of individuals to buy anti-tank missiles and nuclear bombs "shall not be infringed." The clearest thing about the text, after all, is that it says nothing whatsoever about "handguns" -- the word is "arms" so whatever our right to arms is, that's a right to arms not to puny guns.
Like much of the constitution, the second amendment turns out, upon examination, to be an ambiguously worded political compromise written hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Obviously, if you were going to start over from scratch nobody would write it that way.
Jason Zengerle's understandably disappointed that Barack Obama didn't offer a simple "no" to the question of whether or not he agrees with General Pace that homosexuality is immoral. I will just say that for all the pouncing on Pace this past week, it'sworth noting that I think the real liberal point here is that the joint chiefs' views of the morality or immorality of particular sexual practices are really neither here nor there as far as legal discrimination against gay and lesbian servicemembers are concerned. Presumably we have among the ranks of our generals some serious Catholics who think the use of contraceptives is immoral. I'm certain the officers' corps includes many people who think abortions are immoral. No doubt you also have conservative-minded officers of many faiths who think all premarital sex is immoral.
Obviously, though, we're not going to purge all the people who do those things out of the military. Which is what liberalism is all about -- not a quest to achieve a moral consensus on all things and then have it universally applied, but a quest for fair terms of social cooperation that don't require universal moral consensus. The military of a diverse society is bound to include disagreements about what is and is not immoral, so beliefs about the morality of particular sexual practices per se can't be the basis of our policy. The issue at hand is whether there's any real reason to believe the prohibition on openly gay and lesbian soldiers is necessary to maintain military effectiveness and all the evidence suggests that it isn't.
Per continuing blog debate about No Child Left Behind, Kevin Drum observes:
What really bugs me is that politically we're forced to create (and fund) a system that applies to every school system in America even though we all know perfectly well that 80% of our school systems are basically OK and could probably be left alone. It's the other 20% -- the low-income schools located largely in urban inner cities -- that need help.
That's close to true, but the way it goes off the mark is very important. Setting your impoverished inner-city schools aside, there are two kinds of ways the other schools could be considered "basically fine." One would be that taking advantage of their more favorable financial situation and the fact that they're not actually drowning in children from bleak socioeconomic circumstances, they do a good job of educating all the students who come through their doors -- even those who do come from bleak socioeconomic circumstances. Call those, "Type A" good schools. The other kind of good school would be one that just has so few students coming from bleak socioeconomic circumstances that it's average performance level looks pretty good, even though some students are doing no better than the kids in the bad inner-city schools. Call those, "Type B" good schools.
Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.
Yesterday, though, Jonah Goldberg and his readers made the point that no matter what Gonzalez may have done wrong and no matter how bad he may be at his job, it's imperative that he not be fired because that would make liberals happy.
I have a combination of lavish praise and criticism for this Michael Hirsch article on foreign policy doctrine in The Washington Monthly. First, lavish praise. It's the first article I'm aware of to seriously argue a point that I had hoped to be the first one to argue: We don't need "new ideas" in American grand strategy. The old ideas were basically fine. Then came the combination of 9/11 and George W. Bush's decision to abandon the old ideas in favor of new and terrible ones. The confluence of the 9/11 disaster and the disaster of Bushism have convinced many people that the old ideas are discredited or inadequate, but actually everything was fine until Bush tried to abandon the tried and true path of prudent internationalism.
I think this is very right and very important. Everyone should read the article, study the argument, and take it to heart.
Hirsch then kind of grafts this doctrinal point onto a point about Barack Obama which, in turn, is parasitic on an argument about two of Obama's advisors -- Samantha Power and Tony Lake. Hirsch argument about those two might be right, but I don't think he really brings the proof. It's also always worth asking "compared to whom?" Lake and Power, as best I can tell, have a much better track record over the past 4-5 years than do most comparably establishmentish national security people.
UPDATE: Let me say more. This is not to deny that pre-Bush US foreign policy entailed, over the decades, some very serious pragmatic and moral flaws. I think it used to be the case, however, that the main elements of US strategy were basically sound, and presidents sometimes made bad decisions. Bush has turned things on their head and adopted a fundamentally flawed strategy from which he occassionally deviates by doing non-catastrophic things. In particular, it's as if Bush ransacked post-WWII history looking for the areas where American policy has been at its worst -- Indochina and Central America -- and decided to apply the animating spirit of those errors across the board. This is sort of the argument of Empire's Workshop by Greg Grandin and also sort of the argument of The Folly of Empire by John Judis both of which deserve more attention than they got.
So here's an interesting factoid. Here in the West, opinions about 300 naturally diverge. Everyone agrees, however, that the Greeks won the war and defeated Xerxes' efforts to subdue them. The government of Iran, it seems, disputes this maintaining that "no Greek king dared to stand up to the Persian Empire or the Emperor Xerxes" and King Leonidas "lost his head and Iranian fighters threw his head before Emperor Xerxes's feet and told him that he had attempted a suicide attack to Persian Army."
It's interesting that even Iran's contemporary theocrats regard themselves as the heirs to all the pre-Islamic Persian empires. Which goes to show how misleading it is to frame US-Iranian disputes as part of an apocalyptic struggle with "Islamofascism" rather than a sort of banal (but not unimportant!) situation issue where the government of Iran is seeking to assert its interests in the neighborhood where governments of Iran have traditionally sought to assert themselves.
Doing some bloggingheads with Bob Wright, Mickey Kaus argues that while the "neoliberalism is dead because it won" perspective (attributed to me) and the "neoliberalism is dead because it failed" perspective (attributed to Ezra) can't both be right, they can both be wrong. That's Mickey's perspective -- neoliberalism has won some important battles but has much further to go.
I actually think Ezra and I are both right. Read Paul Glastris and you'll see what I mean. On the one hand, a lot of neoliberal ideas have ceased to be distinctively neoliberal because they've become widely accepted. On the other hand, a lot of neoliberal ideas have ceased to be distinctive because lots of neoliberals -- like Paul -- have abandonned the idea that progressive politics can do without entitlement programs or labor unions. In short, most of neoliberalism's good ideas have become mainstream liberal ones, and the remaining distinctively neoliberal ideas tend to be bad ones that have very little left-of-center support these days. The early neoliberals, in short, had a tendency to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but the bathwater really did need to be thrown out. Fortunately, it mostly has been thrown out these days, and relatively few people are left who want to throw out the baby. Hence, the salience of this dispute has tended to be eclipsed while, at the same time, 9/11 has prompted new divisions about different questions.
To be clear; I'm very, very, very eager to see the Iraq War ended. That said, I think the netroots has tended to put too much emphasis on the ins-and-outs of things like today's failed Senate resolution. Realistically, there are two ways the war might end. One would be the election of a president determined to end the war. The other way would be if you had 67 Senators and 290 members of the House willing to back a bill demanding the war's end and overriding Bush's veto
Suffice it to say, that neither timid Democratic Party leadership nor the Blue Dog Caucus, though both -- and especially the latter -- are annoying, is the main impediment to that happening. Rather, it will happen when 17-18 GOP Senators (I dunno the House math) worry that they are going to lose their seats unless they break decisively with Bush's war. Given that kind of bipartisan "cover" the Blue Dogs would gladly go along.
Nothing else really matters. On domestic issues, it's often worthwhile to pass something that the president vetoes simply because it makes a political point. The passage of the bill and the ensuing veto raise the salience of the issue. On something like the war, though, there's no real point in staging veto theater. The people know the war is happening and the war is already unpopular. The issue is that Bush cares more about continuing the war than he does about his approval ratings and that too many GOP legislators feel safe in their seats.
The question on everyone's mind is -- who on John McCain's staff was tasked with filling out his March Madness bracket? You can tell Team McCain is missing Marshall Wittman since Texas (hook 'em!) isn't picked to do very well. Also, that whoever was in charge kind of lacks imagination. McCain has all four number one seeds slated to make it to the Final Four. That's no fun. Though it is, I suppose, in keeping with the general authoritarian theme of the site.
These moves toward adopting legislation to protect private property rights in China are interesting. You have to wonder, for example, what kind of protection a law is supposed to offer if it's administered by a repressive dictatorship and if citizens seeking its enforcement have no recourse to an independent judiciary? It's obviously the case that you can, in practice, combine a capitalist economic system with a dictatorial form of government (see, e.g., Singapore) but it's still true that the logic of capitalist reform pushes in the direction of liberal politics.
An op-ed piece in the Washington Post by Charles Krauthammer has pronounced former Vermont governor Howard Dean “the Delusional Dean.” Krauthammer’s “diagnosis” rested on a transcript of a Dean appearance on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews.
That's David Brock from 2004. Krauthammer likes, of course, to use his status as a psychiatrist to engage in such "diagnoses" of liberals from time to time. Except, as when today, he piously objects to liberals doing the same thing even when it comes in the context of what's pretty clearly a jokey Michelle Cottle article (sample: "None of which is to say that Dick Cheney is, in fact, completely mental"). Also simply note the astounding fact that Krauthammer has actually devoted a column to defending Dick Cheney's job performance. And here I was the other day wondering where the Cheney fans were.
I feel like I recall from college that one point that tended to get raised against extremely reductionist views of mental states was that nobody, no matter what they said in class or wrote in a paper, could bring themselves to genuinely act as if they believed in hardline eliminativist accounts of mind. Apparently, though, this is how Patricia Churchland talks to her husband Paul: "Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven my car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute." More here (PDF).
Andrew Sullivan calls Steve Sailer's essay on Barack Obama "stimulating" while conceding that "Sailer is often blunt, and somewhat callous, I think, in refusing to empathize with the real tensions and difficulties Obama has had to grapple with in a very multicultural life." I wonder if Sullivan got all the way to the end of Sailer's essay, which I found "stimulating" in all the worst ways:
Ron Brownstein notes of Fox News "the network has a large audience, at least some of whom may be open to Democratic arguments." That's clearly true. And, indeed, progrssives have every reason to want the opportunity to present their arguments in a persuasive manner to the Fox News audience. The problem, though, is that this can't be done because Fox News is run by the people who run Fox News.
As I well recall from my appearances on the Hugh Hewitt showing, appearing on hack-controlled media outlets is not an effective method of persuading the audience. The rules are rigged. A debate organized and run by a Republican Party propaganda outlet is not, in practice, going to provide the opportunity for Democrats to persuade Fox-loving conservatives anymore than appearing on Hannity and Colmes contributes to the creation of a balanced and vigorous public sphere. Television is especially tricky for providing the illusion of unmediated reality while, in fact, allowing a thousand different kinds of mediation. Thinking that you can beat television professionals whose job is to make you look bad on a television network that they control is just hubris. Nobody's that smart. Nobody's that clever. Nobody beats the producers.
"This is good counterinsurgency stuff right here."
That's General David Petraeus, shining star of the US Army officer's corps, reduced to talking like a stammering seventeen year-old. Admittedly, the quote is actually two days old. The "good counterinsurgency stuff" is that the American military has succeeded in setting up loudspeakers in town that play "messages from the mayor" along with "verses from the Quran, the Iraqi national anthem and the news, and threw in the latest European scores in soccer, a sport loved by most Iraqis."
I'm looking forward to reading Jonathan Cohn's forthcoming book, Sick very much. Timothy Noah says it's great. I'm told you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but you have to admit that his cover looks pretty awesome.
You may have heard this defense of the administration's conduct in purgegate, and you may have heard the refutations, but I just now saw that the Bush administration itselfdidn't think Clinton did the same thing and left that insight in writing.
I sometimes think I should write more blog posts about Nation articles. Where else, for example, will you find someone deciding that March 2007 is an opportune moment to attack the United Nations from the left as just another instrument of American power. That's not the argument I would make, but there's much more truth to Perry Anderson's view of the matter than to the Martin Peretz critique of the UN as a Franco-Arab tool for the oppression of Jews or the Charles Krauthammer notion of the UN as a Lilliputian effort to tie down the mighty Gulliver.
The way I see it, the United Nations has long been a central part of the effort to construct a viable liberal world order. Such a world order would serve an enlightened account of American interests, but would also serve the interests of the overwhelming majority of the world's people. At its best, postwar American foreign policy has been aimed at using our country's considerable economic and military power to try to create and sustain a liberal world order. Ideally, that view would face equal-and-opposite attacks from the right and the left and thus stay in the driver's seat. In recent years, however, the Nationish vision of a country that sticks to a fairly strict posture of self-defense has become incredibly marginalized in political and media circles opening the door for unilateral militarism to start governing the country in a consistent way rather than being a present-but-submerged element in a basic sound policy.
Bill Clinton, apparently, is all upset that the media is giving Barack Obama a free pass on some allegedly pro-war comments he once made. If you read Obama's actual July 2004 comments, however, he makes the following points:
Based on what he knew as of October 2002, he believed voting for the resolution was a bad idea (and he said so at the time).
Not having been in the Senate at the time, he couldn't say what kind of additional information Senators had access to, and wouldn't rule out the possibility that had he had different information at his disposal, he might have had a different opinion.
But, he thought at the time that members of congress were doing an insufficiently good job of scrutinizing the Bush administration's intelligence claims.
Note that this came in the context of a reporter apparently trying to goad Obama into criticizing John Kerry and John Edwards who, at the time, were running for president against George W. Bush. This sounds to me a lot like an anti-war Senate candidate trying to avoid starting some beef with his party's presidential ticket and not at all like Barack Obama expressing support for the war. Frankly, I think the Clinton camp needs to make up its mind about which argument it's trying to make about the war. I feel like a little while back they were trying to convince me that we shouldn't like Obama more on Iraq because Clinton, too, was against the war. Now they want me to believe that I shouldn't like Obama because he, too, was for the war. But the record is pretty clear -- she was for it; he was against it.
It's not available online as best I can tell, but Laura Rozen has a story in National Journal about the mild opening to talks with Iran which indicates that "State Department officials caution that the shift is less dramatic than the media have portrayed it." It's an interesting article, full of reporting on the many ins-and-outs of low-level Washington-Teheran dialgue since 9/11, but the key takeaway is that there's no bona fide change of heart about the merits of serious diplomatic engagement: "Middle East analysts are divided over whether Washington's openness to limited dialogue with Iran means that the Unites States is moving away from possible confrontation -- or just delaying it."
Anti-war activist invited to be a guest on Meet The Press. The broadcast establishment has, apparently, gone totally bonkers. What will be next -- conservative panelist regularly balanced by equal numbers of liberal ones? No more George Will versus Fareed Zakaria "debates" on television? Ever since I was a young lad watching Tucker Carlson versus Margaret Carlson on Inside Politics the press had adhered rigidly to its "no liberals on the TV" rule. The country needs principles and order. Tradition!
Even at its best, Jeffrey Goldberg's coverage of US politics tends to rub me the wrong way, but the prose is good:
Hunan Dynasty, a few blocks from the Capitol, is not generally considered to be one of Washington’s better Chinese restaurants, which is saying something, because, Chinese-food-wise, Washington is not New York, or, for that matter, Philadelphia. Even its devotees—for example, New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer—admit that the restaurant “always has the faint smell of disinfectant.”
This is very true. The weirdly substandard Chinese food available in the District is nothing short of a national crisis. It's not just that the city is full of "bad Chinese food" (a rather different cuisine from good Chinese food) but it's really bad bad Chinese food. Staggering stuff. It took me a good eighteen months after moving down here from NYC to acclimate. And every time I go back home and try something utterly mediocre by New York standards the results are nothing short of mind-blowing. Surely some kind of immigration reform could ameliorate this, right?
Megan McArdle wonders why, if liberals like single-payer health care systems, but not UK-style single-provider health care systems, don't we all support the idea of school vouchers. I think Kevin Drum mostly gets this right, but let me try to approach it from another direction.
"Surge" into Baghdad prompts surge of insurgent violence in Diyala, presumably because folks just moved over there. Now there's going to be a "mini-surge" of additional forces to Diyala to clamp down on the new problems there.
UPDATE: Oh, also, remember when killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi meant we didn't need to worry about his local jihadist franchise anymore? Oh, well.
Ha, ha, ha -- Michael Ledeen catches France thinking they should be giving us advice as to what to do in Iraq. Imagine that! You'd think they'd just be hiding their heads in shame after the events of the past four years proved them right utterly discredited French thinking about this. Mark Steyn has more on French perfidy. If Dominque de Villepin thinks we should withdraw from Iraq, then I say let's stay forever just to stick it to him!
"No matter how badly Iraq goes it helps the Republicans," writes Tyler Cowen, "who benefit from an emphasis on foreign policy, an area where Democrats are never trusted." This is a fairly widespread view. I give it additional credence because in my experience its main locus is among people who, like Cowen, have somewhat ambivalent feelings about the political parties. That said, I don't see a ton of empirical evidence to back it up.
But the most damning fact about the "surge is working" narrative is that the violence in Iraq always has been cyclical, with dips in violence occurring every year in the months from January through March or April. So, in fact, the decline in violence Kagan observes was entirely predictable, and indeed was predicted. The Pentagon's own "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq" report pointed out that by the end of 2006, the violence in Iraq had reached its highest level since the war began, and so the downtick should be viewed in that context. But what appears likely to happen is what has happened since the beginning of the war: these temporary downticks do not stop the overall upward trend of violence in Iraq. See page 20 of the most recent "Iraq Index" from the Brookings Institution for glaringly obvious proof of this ratcheting up of violence in the country.
Let's just say I don't share the optimism of the Always Wrong Brigades or their allies among the 101 Fighting Keyboarders.
... that the new location of Big Monkey Comics on 14th and Riggs is now open for business? The difference between the closest comic book shop being seven blocks from my house versus the closest comic book shop being in Georgetown should be considerable. Bad news for my personal finances.
UPDATE: Now that my neighborhood's getting all nerded-up with comic books, the Post reminds the truly hip to head to 13th and H Northeast.
"Mr. Chávez said the authorities would remove three zeroes from the denomination of the currency, the bolívar. Then he said the new bolívar, worth 1,000 old bolívars, would be renamed the 'bolívar fuerte,' or strong bolívar." The Times seems to be portraying this as some kind of wacky scheme, but I think it's reasonably common. France sliced some zeros off the franc in 1960 and this had been done in Russia shortly before I arrived there in 1998. It's a perfectly reasonable thing for a country with a big bout of inflation in its past to do as part of setting a new beginning.
The issue, of course, is that you also do need to change the actual policies that led to the inflation, or else rejiggering the values won't do anything.
FreeDarko notes Kobe Bryant outscoring several entire NCAA teams, which seems like as good a hook as any for a question. There are several reasons why the college game produces lower scores than the pros. The game has, for one thing, eight fewer minutes. What's more, the longer shot clock reduces the pace. What I'd really like to know about is efficiency -- are there more or fewer points scored per possession in the average Big Dance game than there are in the average NBA game? By eyeball, the college defenses wind up giving up more open shots (in part because guys are too slow, and in part because the shot clock gives the offense more time to work the ball around) but college offenses miss more open shots, get many fewer easy buckets off penetration, and generally score less efficiently. But that's just me guessing.
Josh Meyer at the LA Times shows that even as administration rhetoric has improved to emphasize the extent to which there's no purely military solution to terrorism, the actual budget has shifted in an even more Pentagon-focused direction.
UDPATE: Eh, I'm taking this down . . . not only did it have a bunch of typos, but they were significantly obscuring my meaning on a subject where it's worth being clear. What I wanted to do was link to Nicholas Kristof's observation that "Democrats are railing at just about everything President Bush does, with one prominent exception: Mr. Bush’s crushing embrace of Israel."
Then I wanted to draw a distinction between two kinds of Democrats. One are Democrats who aren't railing at Bush's Israel policy because they agree with Bush's Israel policy. The other kind are Democrats who do disagree with Bush's Israel policy but who are trying to signal that fact quietly, rather than railing about it, because they think it's too politically risky to rail.
Kenneth Sherrill, who teaches courses on gay politics at the City University of New York, said Obama and Clinton seemed "afraid to say homosexuality is not immoral." He added, "They are afraid of backlash. If you look at the polling data, you find a fairly large percentage of Americans think homosexuality is wrong even though they support equal rights."
It should also be said that in my experience pro-gay liberals, especially younger ones, tend to just assume that Democratic politicians' personal views on these issues are much more progressive than they're prepared to publicly admit. For all we know, however, Clinton and Obama actually are people with ambivalent (at best) views on the moral propriety of gay sex acts despite their support for equal rights. This is a very common view, especially among people who are somewhat older.
The answer to my question about NCAA versus NBA efficiency can be found here where we see that college teams are much more variable in their performance levels than are NBA teams. The most efficient NBA offense belongs to the Phoenix Suns who score 111.11 points per hundred possessions. Thirty NCAA teams, from Florida at the top of the list with 118.9 down to Long Beach State at 111.2, do better than that. Houston has the top pro defense, giving up just 96.8 points per hundred possessions, and there are fifty-six NCAA teams who give up fewer than that. What's more, the higher-seeded NCAA teams tend to both do better than Phoenix on offense and better than Houston on defense.
The average NCAA efficiency level of 102.1 is, however, lower than the NBA has been in recent years, though about where it was during the offensive nadir a little while back.
I don't know anything about Finnish politics, but I feel like punditry would be more interesting if we, like Finland, had three fairly evenly matched parties, one in the center, one in the right, and one on the left. Not that I'm by any means an enthusiastic booster of centrist third party efforts. It's just that, when you think about it, a robust multi-party system grounded in proportional representation elections make it much less obvious what the right political strategy is. The Center Party can't very well win votes by "moving to the center," after all.
Ryan Lizza has a great piece in the NY Times "Week in Review" about the rising importance of star power in presidential campaigns (a favorite theme of mine) and the ways in which too much experience can become a handicap. The article is, however, a reminder that the imperative to frame questions in a journalistically compelling way can end up downplaying the level of experience our current candidates have. Lizza says the existence of comparisons between Barack Obama "only underscores how the bar for experience has been lowered in the ensuing decades" since "Kennedy, after all, had five years in the Navy, six years in the House, and eight years in the Senate, not to mention a Purple Heart, the Navy Medal and a Pulitzer Prize."
I really don't think Megan McArdle's understood what I was saying about vouchers. Giving families more choice about which school to attend: Good idea. Public money without public accountability: Bad idea. Ergo, charter schools are a good idea. Alternatively, you could call it "vouchers" but add a lot of regulations that institutions accepting the vouchers were required to submit to.
That's my general take. In terms of specific proposals, you have to look at specifics. In DC, for example, a sufficiently generous voucher would, if not limited to poor families, probably do a lot to decrease the volume of young professionals moving to the suburbs to raise kids. That, in turn, would have various second-order consequences (on taxes, on property values) that one would have to think about. It's probably worth considering, but DC's in pretty unusual circumstances.
I read a copy of this earlier today and was told it wasn't up on the web yet, but this Googe cache works. It's a New York Review of Books article by George Soros "On Israel, America & AIPAC." It's a long piece, so I wouldn't want to commit myself to the proposition that I agree with every single sentence inside it, but it strikes me as basically correct and likely to prompt many, many, many an unfair attack. It's also likely to create some trouble for Soros-backed groups and Soros-backed organizations. On one level, that's too bad, since nobody deserves that kind of trouble.
On the other hand, this whole debate has gotten a little painfully meta with tons of back-and-forth about whether people are being intimidated, or whether people are anti-semites, or using charges of anti-semitism to intimidate people, etc., etc., etc. At some point, it would be good to not cut through that and debate the actual issue at hand -- whether the United States should adopt different policies vis-a-vis Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict -- and if Soros' article pushes things in that direction, it'll be all to the good.
David Frum, reviewing Mark Steyn's book, makes a great point that's been weirdly ignored during the contemporary fad over demographic fear-mongering: "Demographic trends have a surprising way of reversing themselves with amazing rapidity. Nobody foresaw the baby boom in 1938. And yet only eight years later, birth rates surged all through the developed world, in devastated Germany and Japan as well as in victorious Britain and America. OK, there was a big war in between. But s late as 1966, most forecasters thought the baby boom would continue indefinitely."
Not only has George Packer put together a really heartbreaking story for The New Yorker about the bleak fate of Iraqis who've worked with the US military in Iraq, but he also managed to get a pretty inflammatory bit of Bush-bashing our of Richard Armitage that was pretty tangential to the main thread of the piece: "The President believes so firmly that he is President for just this mission—and there’s something religious about it—that it will succeed, and that kind of permeates. I just take him at his word these days. I think it’s very improbable that he’ll be successful."
Packer also notes that as discussed in the Iraq sex post, unlike in Vietnam, American officials in Iraq have relatively little in the way of personal relationships with Iraqis -- just professional ones that tend to be fairly shortlived as people rotate in-and-out of country -- and this makes it relatively unlikely that people will go the extra mile to help people who need helping. And, of course, to help anyone you'd first need to admit that we've faled. And, per Armitage, Bush won't do that.
It seems the East Coast gambling mecca is falling on hard times, facing "what analysts predict could be Atlantic City’s first annual drop since gambling was legalized in the state in 1977." The hope is that they'll be able to take AC upscale and make it more like a miniature version of Las Vegas. In principle, it seems like a good idea. Las Vegas is 270 miles from LA, which is about the distance between Boston and Atlantic City -- New York, Philadelphia, and Washington are all much closer. In principle, it could be a place people go a lot. But it's just awful -- really, profoundly unappealing. And it certainly looks as if it's been on the decline in years, though based on that Times account it hasn't.
I missed it the first time around when Glenn Beck called Hillary Clinton a "stereotypical bitch." Now I see via Brendan Nyhan that he followed up later explaining "I never said that Hillary Clinton -- excuse the language -- I never said that Hillary Clinton was a bitch. I said she sounded like one." Which, if you check the transcript, is arguably true, but hardly a defense.
Which brings around a larger question I don't think I've aired on this blog: Why on earth does Glenn Beck have that show on CNN Headline News? I'm not what you'd call a regular reader, but there's outrageous crap like this on every time I tune in. They just stop doing regular news for a little while and give us all our daily does of GOP talking points, misogyny, Arab- and Muslim-bashing, etc. And for what? Because the right-wing cable news niche seemed empty?
The search for sex in Iraq blog-quest started in a lighthearted spirit, but the more one thinks and reads about it the more the real answer looks rather dark. "I was trying to understand how being a woman fit into both the war and the psychological consequences of war," writes Sara Corbett in her New York Times Magazinecover story on women in the Iraq War, "the story I heard over and over, the dominant narrative really, followed similar lines to Swift's: allegations of sexual trauma, often denied or dismissed by superiors; ensuing demotions or court-martials; and lingering questions about what actually occurred."
Helen Benedict did a piece for Salon on woman soldiers' allegations of rape in Iraq. When you think about it, you're really looking at the worst possible mixture of circumstances, institutions, and political inconvenience here. I bet when this war finally ends we'll learn a lot more about what was really happening and it's mostly going to be very ugly.
Hewitt opens the book with an odd quote though: "Mr. President," Dean Acheson says in a call to Harry Truman. "The North Koreans have invaded South Korea." Hewitt writes, "It is with evenings like that one of June 24, 1950, in mind that Americans ought to cast their primary and general election votes for presidents. When devastating surprises arrive, whether on Dec. 7, 1941, Sept. 11, 2001, or any such future day - and there will be many - our country's survival depends upon the man or woman in the Oval Office."
Now maybe it's a New York thing, but if I didn't know I was reading a Romney book by a Romney fan, I'd immediately have figured I was about to read about Rudy Giuliani.
I think this brilliantly sums up what's so wildly off-base about conservative thinking. Absolutely nothing in Giuliani's history suggests that he is any more skilled than a randomly chosen individual at plotting a military response to an armed attack on the United States of America. I understand, of course, why it is that as a matter of electoral politics an "image of toughness" matters more than actual experience or sound policy ideas. What's crazy about today's rightwingers, however, is that they've chosen not only to accept this slice of politico-media reality but actively embrace it. K-Lo isn't saying that she thinks others will think Giuliani is good on national security for irrational reasons. She's saying that she thinks this is true and as best I can tell every conservative pundit in the business thinks the same thing. All of them are actually incapable of discerning the difference between "acts like a jerk" and "would do a good job of organizing a military campaign."
In addition, we're seeing a slightly odd revaluation of values. It used to be that the characterological trait looked for in these situations was a kind of stoical poise -- someone who could think clearly in the midst of a crisis and issue calm, decisive orders. Giuliani is a bit temperamental and high-strung -- prone to lashing-out at radio show callers; his campaign staff doesn't even trust him to go eyeball-to-eyeball with the national press corps. He's a sentimentalist who stands by his corrupt friends, a glory hound who fires competent aides who get too popular (imagine FDR sacking Eisenhower in the middle of the war), prone to bouts of senseless cruelty (see, e.g., his treatment of Donna Hanover), public hand-wringing (see, e.g., his abortive 2000 Senate campaign), poor strategic judgment (endorsing Cuomo in '94), who looks to turn crises to personal advantage (see, e.g., his effort to suspend the rule of law and stay in office past the expiration of his term).
Ah, nice -- Barack Obama under attack from Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, the group that provides the right-wing alternative to AIPAC that the United States so desperately needs. In addition to urging you to vote against Obama, ZOA wants you to boycott coca-cola. Klein, and other Israel hawks, apparently object to Obama's self-consciously inoffensive themes that hope is good and cynicism is bad.
Read Kevin Drum on this. People have some genuinely weird ideas about teacher's unions, who are held to have almost mystical levels of power over the political process along with a spookily powerful malign impacts on the education system. Did you know that, for example, the unions are so powerful that union-skeptical neoliberal education policy wonks have the ears of all three of the leading Democratic candidates for president?
Suffice it to say that were Megan's deal wherein liberals get to get literally everything we want on education policy as long as she gets to bust the unions actually on the table, I'd take it. The reason liberals don't take that deal is it isn't actually on the table.
To my ears "Zodiac killer" refers to the copycat serial killer who was active in NYC in the early 1990s, so I was a little confused heading into this film about the real Zodiac killer in early 1970s San Francisco. This is a movie that gets all the little things right, tons of great scenes, really deep, solid cast, good all around acting. Unfortunately, the filmmakers didn't seem to decide which story they were telling. Chronolically, you get two things that are each about 65 percent of a movie -- the first is about the Zodiac investigation and how it hit a dead end around Arthur Leigh Allen. The second is about how Robert Graysmith revived interest in a de facto dead case and uncovered new evidence implicating Allen.
So I'm reading more of Steve Sailer on Barack Obama and I notice that he, like a lot of other pundits -- David Ehrenstein and Peter Beinart for example -- assumes that the essence of the reason white people like Barack Obama has some important relationship to views about race relations. You can see some evidence of this in things like this Richard Cohen column, but even Cohen emphasizes that:
But mostly I want Obama to run because he would come into the race with no baggage on Iraq. Not from him would we hear excuses about how he was misled by the Bush administration into thinking there were weapons of mass destruction there. Obama not only was against the war when he ran for the Senate but he can claim -- as could the 21 Democratic senators who voted against the war resolution -- that it was possible to accept the "facts" at the time and still see that the war was unnecessary, if not downright stupid.
Right. This strikes me as the essential problem with most Obama-related theorizing. Pundits are basically using made-up stories about the roots of Obama's political appeal as hooks for their own writing about race. If you look, however, at Obama's base of support the phenomenon looks pretty banal. Obama is popular among the intersecting groups of black people, young people, and people for whom Iraq is a high priority issue. This, of course, is not very hard to explain. Obama is black, relatively young, and has a consistent record of opposition to the Iraq War. And, obviously, he's good at giving speeches to large crowds.
The inconvenient truth for anyone looking to make the "experience matters" argument is that the least-experienced president was not, as I said yesterday Jimmy Carter, but instead the well-regarded Abraham Lincoln. Of course, though nobody can ever decide what "exception that proves the rule" means, the 1860 election is the exception that proves the rule. We saw a robust multi-party election, in which the two candidates running toward the center (Bell and Douglas) got crushed in the electoral college by candidates playing to the extremes. It's always interesting to note that, had the Civil War not ended in a Union victory and with the semi-deification of Lincoln, it's almost certain that more people would have noticed that the electoral system that put Lincoln in the White House was absurd.
His platform was decisively rejected by sixty percent of the voters all of whom, despite their differences, opposed the Republican anti-slavery line. What's more, the political ascendancy of a party pushing an unpopular extremist agenda led directly to horrifically bloody civil strife. Now, as it happens, slavery was an appalling moral evil so nobody's very upset in retrospect that the median (white male) voter didn't get the Douglas Administration it clearly wanted. Nevertheless, it's still not a desirable feature of the voting system in general.
Michael Kinsley is a brilliant writer who, unfortunately, has spawning about four dozen unbearable second-rate imitators. Sometimes, though, it's like he's playing a second-rate imitator of himself: "I’m sorry, but I just can’t see how firing eight can be heinous but firing 93 is perfectly OK. Nor can I see—if the issue is neutral justice—how firing someone from your own party is worse than firing someone from the other party." I can't imagine that Kinsley can't actually see the difference here. The issue, obviously, isn't the crude quantity of firings, but the nature of the firings.
Looks like Alberto Gonzalez is on the way out. Among the potential replacements "George J. Terwilliger III, a former deputy attorney general and acting attorney general who was a leader of Bush's legal team during the Florida election recount." I hope he doesn't get the nomination, and I hope if he does get the nomination, the confirmation process is smooth. I, for one, absolutely refuse to be placed in a situation where I may need to speak the words "George J. Terwilliger III" out loud in a professional context. If the man gets himself a less ridiculous name, he may have a bright future in politics.
"I fought the war, I fought the war, I fought the war But the war won. I fought the war, I fought the war, I fought the war But the war won't stop for the love of God."
The documents are here and boy there are a lot of them. This will be an interesting test for the internet age. A thousand monkeys at a thousand laptops looking at a giant stack of documents should be able to find interesting nuggets more effectively than a handful of congressional staffers, no matter how crackerjack said staffer may be. Kevin Drum's got something here. I diavlog on the attorney purge with Byron York here. York, of course, doesn't have a liberals' innate suspicion of the Bush administration, but he can't quite achieve Kinsley-esque levels of nonchalance about it either.
You may recall Paul Tough's long article from last fall about the network of charter schools run by the Knowledge is Power Program. The schools have had a lot of success, but my thought reading the article was that there was simply no way you could scale something like that up to the size necessary to make it a real model for anything. Well, it looks like they're going to try in Houston where various foundations are going to give $65 million to start 42 schools.
Jay Matthews' article is frustratingly unclear on all the points I, your not-so-knowledgeable news consumer, would like to learn more about. For example, how much money is this in the broader context of schools in Houston? What will the $65 million be spent on? Roughly how many students are supposed to attend these 42 schools?
Via Robert Farley, the Russians are stepping up the pressure on the Iranian nuclear program. This, certainly, is good news. This is really the thing to keep in mind regarding the nuclear issue. Other countries can hurt Iran a lot more than we can. Conversely, if other countries decide to actively help Iran go nuclear, they can be enormously helpful. This dynamic -- the attitude of countries that are neither the United States nor Iran -- is the key variable that's in play and American actions all need to be geared toward winning that diplomatic battle. Insofar as we're the reasonable ones, the ones willing to cut a reasonable deal, the ones who aren't going to do anything crazy, etc. we have a very good chance of scoring continued success.
Electoral prospects for the Democrats in 2008 look reasonably bright, but my latest TAP Online column argues that liberals expecting an imminent era of progressive domestic reform are probably fooling themselves.
Steve Clemons reports that Ron Unz is going to be taking over as publisher of The American Conservative which seems like basically excellent news to me. Scott McConnell will continue as editor. I have, obviously, any number of disagreements with the general editorial line over there, but it would be a healthy thing for there to be stronger voices arguing for a vision of conservatism that amounts to something other than relentless cheerleading for the GOP leadership and perpetual war.
I noted yesterday that while pundits enjoy spinning complicated theories about what support for Barack Obama reveals about American attitudes toward race, the evidence suggests that Obama's white support primarily comes from people who like his stance on Iraq. It's just a coincidence that neither of his major white opponents can claim to have been consistent opponents of the war. Daniel Larison concedes that this may be so, but says Obama's mostly positive press coverage must still stem from people's yearning for a black savior to heal America's racial divide. This could be so, but I have my doubts.
"Why are low-skilled men withdrawing from work just when unskilled jobs appear plentiful and immigrants are flooding into the country to take them?" asks Lawrence Mead who answers, "male work discipline has deteriorated. Poor men want to work and succeed, yet many cannot endure the slights and disappointments that work involves. That's why poor men usually can obtain jobs yet seldom keep them." Frankly, one has to sympathize with this. Presumably NYU political science professors like Mead don't need to put up with the sort of slights experienced by people doing unskilled labor. Similarly, my peer group is obviously full of high-skill people who've chosen to embrace the demimonde of journalism rather than put up with the slights and disappointments involved in working at a major law firm or a management consultancy. Those who choose to take the "slights and disappointments" path, meanwhile, are very generously compensated for their trouble.
Rather than suggest, however, that low-skill men would be more inclined to favor formal employment were formal employment rendered more attractive through, e.g., higher pay or more dignified working conditions, Mead suggests -- really -- that we deploy the coercive apparatus of the criminal justice system in order to mold such men into a more readily pliant worker class. "Nonworking men deserve to earn more," Mead concedes, "but they also must be required to work, as they seldom are today." Even on his own terms, Mead's proposal seems backwards, likely to make poor black men even more instinctively averse to the slights and disappointments of formal employment which will now come to be seen specifically as a form of punishment.
Al From, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and pollster Mark Penn wrote a strategy memo to DLC supporters last week warning party leaders not to use Bush's problems as an invitation to call for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, or generally to steer a more liberal course that could alienate the middle-of-the-road voters the party needs. . . .
From and Penn said the most defensible ground for Democrats is a middle path: rejecting deadlines for troop withdrawal but endorsing "clear benchmarks" to measure progress and hold Bush accountable for the results.
That was December 2005. Penn is Hillary Clinton's pollster and one of her key political strategists. And now he's very upset that people might attack his candidate from the left on national security issues.
In response to Scott Lemieux here, I'm not saying Al Gore "squandered opportunities" primarily in the sense of being to blame for losing the 2000 election (though I do now have fascinating insights ont he psychodynamics of this argument). Rather, I'm saying that 2000 (when Gore happened to be the nominee) and 2001 (when Gore would have been president, had he secured a majority of electoral votes) were a relatively auspicious time for ambitious legislative goals. The favorable fiscal situation and generally upbeat mood of the country created, I think, a wider feasible set of potential policy shifts than exists today. This can be seen in part, I think, in the manner in which Bush was able to push a gigantic tax cut package through congress; my basic contention is that it would have been feasible for a progressive president to secure a similarly-scaled, though differently directed, package of reforms.
In 2009, even if the election goes well, I expect the constraints to be tighter than they would have been in 2001 had that Florida recount gone differently. Then what I was saying about Gore is simply that he didn't, in fact, propose a particularly ambitious domestic agenda during the 2000 campaign. Instead, it was focused on a large number of small initiatives that would, in the aggregate, have done good things for the country but none of which constituted large structural changes to anything.
The story about the walking back of intelligence claims about the DPRK's uranium enrichment program continues, I think, not to get the level of attention it deserves. Joe Cirincione has a great article on the subject on the Foreign Policy website.
Someday, Cato ought to pay me to write a lengthy denunciation of sportswriters' habits of picking "winners" and "losers" in trade deals. Here, Chris Sheridan runs down all 62 swaps made since the start of the 2005-2006 training camps, picking winners and losers in each case, never considering that market exchange is not normally a zero sum activity. The Battier-Roy trade has, for example, worked out great for the Rockets. I don't, however, see any particular reason for Memphis to regret it. A trade is a cooperative enterprise, not a competitive one.
Marc Lynch, proprietor of the invaluable Abu Aardvark blog is coming to GWU this fall. DC could use more people who write about the Arab world while possessing actual information about it.
The thing about this is that if you're a Mac user, or just travel in sufficiently techie circles where you'll recognize this as based on a Mac ad, this ad sends a very clear message: Hillary Clinton's campaign is like a Windows computer -- gray, tedious, dull, etc. If, by contrast, you're not familiar with the source ad, it's sending a very different message: Hillary Clinton is a would-be totalitarian dictator. The former sentiment is a sentiment that, I think, a lot of us liberal political junkies can share and certainly something that I think is fair game. The latter sentiment, by contrast, is not only a pretty outrageous claim but also happens to precisely echo one of the incredibly large set of unhinged attacks the right wing has been perpetrating against Clinton for over a decade now. I very much don't want to say that liberals should all treat Clinton with kid gloves, but I do think people should at least try to be somewhat careful about not re-enforcing these narratives.
Andrew Sullivan's waiting "for the first Republican to actively run against the toxins of Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity and the rest." I doubt you'll see it. He says that "if the culture shifts more decisively against the angry right, I may not have to wait long." One can imagine swing voter types shifting more decisively against the angry right and the Democrats winning a bunch of elections. People like that, though, aren't an important constituency in Republican primaries. It's hard to see why a Republican would actively run against the programming choices of their core audience unless GOP loyalists started getting turned off by it. If they did, however, my guess is that Republican media types would change their spots.
They strike me as more cynical and greedy than hardbitten ideologues. It's hard to imagine, for example, any sort of principled ideologue of any ideology whatsoever being as loyal to the Bush administration as a Sean Hannity. Even if you agree with all the principles underlying Bushism, all Bush has done is make those principles look bad. If Hannity's audience starts wanting moderation and caution, he'll start giving it to them.
My understanding is that congress can impeach whoever it likes -- not just Bush, Cheney, or Alberto Gonzalez but any Bush appointee at all. Mark Kleiman suggests impeaching Karl Rove, and notes that Article II, Section 4 provides for impeachment of "any Civil Official of the United States." Not, in other words, military officers. At any rate, with Republican Senators calling for Gonzalez to resign and/or be fired, my first instinct is to say that Democrats should go for it -- call the Senators' bluffs. How upset are they about this, really? Upset enough to vote to convict?
I'll be gone most of the day at this Rand Corporation public policy forum on "Coping With Iran: Confrontation, Containment or Engagement?" My hope would be that these aren't strictly incompatible choices, as in the contain and engage plan. And, clearly, preparing to contain is confrontation except insofar as we just understand "confrontation" to be code talk for "starting a war." Seems like a good roster of people, folks from across the spectrum but weighted toward the sensible side of things.
This is a little deep in the weeds for me, but former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami argues that the correct response to renewed interested in negotiating in some sense on the basis of the 2002 Saudi peace initiative is for the Israelis to go back to the 2000-vintage Clinton plan that Arafat rejected as their negotiating posture. Ben-Ami notes that this whole range of then-Likud politicians who denounced Ehud Barack for even considering such a thing then are now willing to contemplate discussing the Saudi initiative which is less favorable to Israel along several dimensions. As I say, this gets deeper into the weeds than I care to go (there's no reason the USA should care if the parties agree to "a division of the Old City" or else decide for "a special arrangement for that complex area, without a division of sovereignty" as long as they're prepared to agree) but it's interesting reading.
"President Bush and Congress clashed Tuesday over an inquiry into the firing of federal prosecutors and appeared headed toward a constitutional showdown over demands from Capitol Hill for internal White House documents and testimony from top advisers to the president," according to The New York Times. Talk of a constitutional showdown here is a bit overblown. Congress has asked the White House to send some people to testify. Bush has refused to comply with this, proposing instead a truly quarter-assed compromise that, as Mark Kleiman says, "would give them virtual carte blanche to lie."
So far, no constitutional clash. Congress has requested the presence of some aides in order to look into (a) some apparent lying to congress, which is illegal and (b) appropriate legislative fixes for the institutional setup that let the purge happen in the first place. Bush has denied that request. The next step is for congress to subpoena those witnesses. I think it's smart and proper to make a polite request first and try to work something out before reaching for the subpoena, but Bush isn't making a good-faith effort to cooperate which is what subpoena power is for. The clash, if any, will come if and when Bush decides to just defy a properly executed congressional subpoena. There's no political reason for congress not to use its legal powers to their full extent; the recent drop in congressional approval ratings is primarily driven by Democrats disgruntled by a lack of boldness.
In an interesting parallel with politicians' insistence that military options be kept "on the table" in dealing with Iran, the more hawkish Iran-policy hands (represented at today's events by people from WINEP) appear to be taking a rhetoric approach that involves loudly agreeing with mainstream analysts that diplomacy is the way to go and then later slipping all kinds of war-oriented assertions into the mix. Michael Eisenstadt was really good at this, offering a presentation that emphasized diplomacy but, in fact, involved diplomacy aimed at conditions Iran will never accept. He praised David Ochmanek's restrained-but-convincing account of what would be problematic about coping with a nuclear Iran, but also added "tens or even hundreds of millions could die if Iran gets nuclear weapons and decides to use them."
Similarly, US airstrikes would probably prompt a rally-round-the-flag effect in Teheran but, hey, "the Bolshevik revolution was brought on in part by the pressures of world war one." The most notable thing, however, was the nature of Eisenstadt's bottom-line objection to military options. Attacking Iran would, he said, greatly expand the scope of the war on terror. This, in turn, he said would be a bad idea primarily because there's no political support for it in the United States, which would make it impossible to pull off effectively. That, clearly, is true, but it's about the shallowest possible source of opposition to a proposed war.
To expand on Atrios' point here, record companies are never going to make any money unless they abandon their demented obsession with Digital Rights Management. Now that I'm no longer a no-income college student, I tend to find that ceteris paribus it makes more sense for me to obtain digital music through legal means. It's more convenient, I like to think of myself as a law-abiding person, I think artists whose work I like should benefit commercially from their work (no matter how little revenue an artist gets from an album it's better to sell more rather than fewer copies), it's nice to know all the meta-data will be properly organized, etc.
On the other hand, the DRM that comes on iTunes store stuff -- DRM that makes it impossible or inconvenient to do things I'm legally entitled to do with music I own -- is ridiculous and annoying. So I signed up for my eMusic account and I use it anytime a song I want is available. Which means no major labels (and all-too-few indie labels) because they don't trust the DRM-free format. And, frankly, when there's something I want that's not available on eMusic it's very frequently the case that I turn to my favorite BitTorrent search engine. I'm not only willing, but happy to pay for the convenience and legality of eMusic rather than use BitTorrent. But it's crazy to expect tech-savvy young people to pay money for a DRM-crippled product that's inferior to the one you not only can easily steal, but must illegally steal because the record labels won't sell it to you. What's more, DRM is famously impotent to actually stop copyright violations. You only need one person to go through the mildly annoying steps necessary to strip the file of its DRM (for an iTunes file, burn it to a CD, then rip the CD back to your computer) and upload it to the internet one time for your album to available to would-be violators. Under the circumstances, it's lunatic to actually make the un-DRMed version of the album unavailable to non-violators.
Here they come. Good work, Democrats. I'm not sure, however, that Matt Stoller totally captures the dynamic here. The thing about something like the US Attorneys purge is that it has no public policy upshot. Challenging the Republicans strongly on the issue just amounts to challenging the GOP as such, rather than to challenging any wealthy or influential interest groups. These are the sorts of situations where 90 percent of Democrats can be counted on to be good 90 percent of the time.
In particular, folks like Rahm Emmannuel and Chuck Schumer who frequently aren't progressives' best friends can be very reliably counted on to push this sort of scandalmongering quite fiercely as they correctly see it as all political upside. Which is all to the good. Nevertheless, comendable behavior on this sort of thing doesn't have any necessary relationship to whether or not we'll see comendable behavior on topics with more substantive bite down the road.
"Jews can't seem to tolerate, let alone embrace, the fastest growing Christian movement in America, a movement that views support for Israel as central to its mission," whines Abby Wisse Schachter in The Weekly Standard, complaining that "what Jews hate are Republicans and the conservative agenda." Adam Kushner does a great job with Schachter, but let me make a couple of additional points. One is that the nature of Christian Zionism's "support" for Israel has become increasingly unhinged. I think, for example, that an Israeli military strike on Iran would actually be counterproductive to Israeli security interests in several ways. John Hagee goes much further than I and actually believes an Israeli attack on Iran will lead to Israel's conquest and utter extinction.
The differnece is that Hagee runs a group called Christians United for Israel and thinks US policy should be aimed at encouraging Israel to launch the war he believes will lead to its conquest and destruction. AIPAC, acting a little bit crazy and a little bit foolish, is Hagee best pal but most Jewish Americans can smell a rat here. The other thing to say is that we once again see conservative Jews berating their much more numerous liberal co-religionists on the grounds that we are failing to manifest dual loyalties, but just try suggesting in print that "pro-Israel" groups are trying to foster a sense of dual loyalties and see how The Weekly Standard reacts to that (the Standard, it seems to me, is actually loyal only to the cause of war and bloodshed rather than any particular nation; though they clearly do prefer Americans or Israelis to be either killing or dying).
"Google the term 'Mom-fluentials' and have some fun with it," suggested a correspondent with whom I was discussing my distaste for Hillary Clinton pollster/strategist Mark Penn. The results are, indeed, sobering. The concept was, apparently, developed by Penn's company Burston-Marsteller as a coprorate PR corollary to Penn's political PR hits like "office park dads." See the hilarious video here.
Mom-fluentials turn out to be just one subspecies of e-fluential. You can take the quiz to determine if you are an e-fluential. Having a famous blog wasn't good enough to qualify me.
In partial defense of Rudy Giuliani's seemingly creepy and authoritarian notion that "freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do" I believe this is essentially the view the great philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's view of the matter as well. He's still, I think, a pretty creepy authoritarian but the idea he's expressing has a reasonably distinguished lineage and isn't just some madness he dreamed up on his couch one afternoon.
What's more, if you back a way a little from Giuliani's extreme formulation of the claim I think you'll see that there's some wisdom in it. The cause of political liberty is not, in fact, served by living in an underpoliced city. Generally speaking, while freedom does require that authority not overstep its proper bounds, it also very much requires that properly constituted authorities be reasonably strong and effective. The absence of effective state institutions does not make contemporary Baghdad freer" than Boston in any way that makes "freedom" denote a worthwhile political ideal.
Spent a bunch of time over the past half hour SMS-ing and otherwise communicating with friends and putative sources trying to hunt down rumors that John Edwards is going to drop out of the race tomorrow. My brilliant speculation was that this might be related to his wife experience health problems. Turns out I should have just come to terms with the fact that I'm not much of a reporter and . . . read The New York Times where Adam Nagourney has what there is to know of the story: "John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat making a second bid for the presidency, called a news conference for Thursday to discuss the future of his campaign. On Wednesday, Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, visited Mrs. Edwards’ doctor to assess her health to follow up on her recovery from a bout of breast cancer."
Obviously, I'm not in a position to know exactly what that means, but it seems to indicate a bad diagnosis for Mrs. Edwards and, quite likely, an end to the Edwards campaign.
Jonah Goldberg says his much-mocked bookLiberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton is being misunderstood: " book isn't like Dinesh's latest book. It isn't like any Ann Coulter book. It isn't what the Amazon description says or what the Economist claims it is. Or what Frank Rich imagines it is," he writes, "It is a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." And I'm sure it is. They probably got a dozen men to hold him down, while another pointed a gun at his head and said "look Goldberg, I know you're doing seriously scholarship here, but you've just got to use that subtitle. We're liberals, after all, not afraid to use a little castor oil to get our way."
At long last available here. From a foreign policy perspective, it's close to a nightmare scenario -- The New Republic on the left, National Review on the right.
