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
