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.
Let me link to Sara Mead's long, excellent rebuttal to Megan McArdle's recent efforts to turn me into a vouchers advocate. Loosely relatedly, David Boaz starts out this post with a worthy complaint about conservative businessmen who are totally against government intervention into the market except when they're asking for government subsidies. Then, however, he writes:
One of the values of a political philosophy–sometimes dismissed as “ideology” or “dogma”–is that it gives us a rule, a set of principles, for deciding such questions. We don’t have the time to look at all the data and decide what we think about every issue, and we’re certainly all subject to personal biases on the issues that touch us. There are lots of speakers I’d personally like to shut up, but if I remember that I do believe in the First Amendment, I realize I have to allow even offensive speech. I may want Amtrak to run fast trains between Washington and New York, or I may want to keep my own factory in business. But if I remember that the free-market economy produces the best results for all of us, then I will accept the outcomes of the market process.
This, to me, is more or less why it's not a very good idea to try and debate policy specifics with libertarians. That it's an ideology that precludes trying to decide issues through some dull "look at all the data and decide what we think about every issue" doesn't, of course, demonstrate that it's incorrect, but it hardly lays the groundwork for a productive exchange of ideas.
UPDATE:What Kevin said. I should say I don't want to associate myself with the pretense that my views are strictly determined by weighing empirical evidence in an ideology-free vacuum; I just also wouldn't consider setting particular facts aside a virtue. To use Boaz's example, whatever merits free markets may have they clearly don't do a good job of producing high-speed intercity rail service.
The Washington Postproposes "If questions remain, Mr. Rove and Ms. Miers should be interviewed. They don't have to testify under oath, since lying to Congress is a crime." Jonathan Chait disposes.
The Post editorial page endorsed John Kerry, so you can hardly see they're Republican apparatchiks. Still, they've managed to consistently show a great deal more concern for the personal well-being of high-level Bush administration appointees (heaven forbid they should have to testify under oath!) than any other single aspect of national policy.
I know a lot of people found the debate over the Employee Free Choice Act somewhat tedious and I suppose I'd have to admit that I find labor law to be a pretty dull subject. Dull, and yet vitally important to the futur of the country. Steven Hill and Dmitri Iglitzin write about some other issues in need of reform, notably:
For example, a subsection of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 makes it an unlawful "secondary boycott" for a labor union to bring any type of pressure against any person or business other than the employer where the unionized workers work. That means unions cannot challenge a parent corporation's directives to its subsidiary or a subcontractor, even if the directive might cause all of the employees to lose their jobs.
As they point out, one rarely sees this standard applied to any other sort of interaction and it's very harmful to efforts to make unions effective (which, of course, is the point).
In case there's no TV at your office, Elizabeth Edwards' cancer has returned and has spread to her bones. It's treatable, but not curable. For now, she's asymptomatic. And the campaign, it seems, will go on. I have to say I think it's a surprising decision, but they there's no reason to think campaigning would interfere with her treatment, which I guess makes sense rationally.
As you may know, I'm working on a book. As of yet, it has no title. The contract refers, I believe, to The Untitled Matthew Yglesias Foreign Policy Project, which is pretty cool. Sam Rosenfeld suggests IRL a mashup of that idea with Ezra's proposal for Jonah Goldberg and release The Matthew Yglesias Foreign Policy Project: A Very Serious, Thoughtful Argument that has Never Been Made in Such Detail or with Such Care. I'll let you know when to start the preordering.
Jodi Kantor reported in the March 6 New York Times that Barack Obama had disinvited the pastor of his church from his campaign announcement in order to try and prevent his pastor's views from becoming an issue in the campaign. Via Matt Stoller, it seems that the pastor in question, Jeremiah Wright, is really pissed off at the Times.
Hillary Clinton gets classy, while the Obama camp seems to have no response to the Edwardses announcement earlier today.
UPDATE: Something went out from Obama at 3:21 PM Eastern, a little bit before I posted this: "Today, Michelle and I join every American in sending our thoughts and prayers to Elizabeth and John and the entire Edwards family. We all admire Elizabeth's strength and determination and the deep love they so obviously share."
Jason Chandler has assembled a complete database of NBA player performance based on the Wages of Wins methodology. It's interesting the varied results you get. For the Wizards, for example, their numbers indicate that Etan Thomas is better than Brendan Haywood and that an Arenas-Daniels back court is better than a Stevenson-Arenas back court. That's all well within the range of things that normal people think.
For the Knicks, however, you get the result that Steve Francis, Quentin Richardson, Renaldo Balkman, David Lee, and Eddy Curry is a devastatingly effective lineup (with Curry as, by far, the weak link). One that would, collectively, go 82-0 over the course of the season if not for the need to give playing time to backups, in no small part because Lee is actually the best player in the league. I guess I don't really believe that, but it seems to me that the Knicks should at least give it a try. Jared Jeffries off the bench is also said to be a somewhat above-average performer.
Readers have probably noticed a certain lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign around here, but in partnership with Sam Rosenfeld I lay out the case against in its official form in the new issue of The American Prospect:
Liberal Democrats should want a nominee who is, in fact, a liberal. And liberals and moderates alike have should want a nominee who's seen as a moderate by the median voter. Clinton, however, is a moderate who people think is a liberal. This is a terrible combination of qualities from almost every point of view -- except, perhaps, for the faction of her advisers whose views are probably too right-wing to be associated with the Democratic presidential nominee, unless they can latch onto the one candidate both blessed and cursed with an undeserved reputation for liberalism. Well, bully for them. But liberals should open their eyes.
The Forward's coverage of George Soros, Nicholas Kristof and others generating some AIPAC-related controversy lately is generally quite good, but this graf is absurd:
But Soros’s greatest critic is no doubt New Republic editor Martin Peretz, who posted only a brief reaction on his blog to Soros’s article, promising to elaborate when he returns from his trip abroad. Peretz had attacked Soros in February for saying that the United States would need “de-Nazification” after President Bush leaves office, charging that Soros himself had been guilty of collaborating with the Nazis as a teenager in Hungary. Soros replied in the magazine that the charge was false, and Peretz backed off somewhat. Now, however, he has promised to come back with guns blazing, after he returns from an overseas trip.
“Since he has picked the scab off his own wound this time, I will not be so kind this time,” Peretz warned.
Surely the charge that George Soros was a Nazi collaborator isn't the sort of thing that should be tossed out there and just allowed to hang. It's true, of course, that Peretz has made this charge, but as best anyone can tell he made it baselessly because he doesn't like Soros. There's not a serious factual dispute.
On the latter point, the Bush administration does seem to be shifting in tone. With the departure of several key Bush hardliners in recent months, it feels as if the regime-change fever has broken in Washington. While still talking tough, chief Iran envoy Nicholas Burns sounded almost magnanimous toward Tehran on Wednesday as he detailed the “multiple points of pressure” being applied on Iran’s leaders. Speaking at a Rand Corp. conference on Capitol Hill, Burns said the Western allies are still very willing to offer Tehran a nearly simultaneous "suspension for suspension"—that is, the West will stop the U.N. resolution process if Iran ceases enriching—even though the Americans and Europeans are in a much stronger position than they were several months ago. Just as importantly, Burns said the United States was sensitive to Tehran’s need to save face after its leaders have spent months defiantly insisting that they would never give up their uranium-enrichment program. “We understand they have their domestic political arena” to think about, he said. “We have carefully given the Iranians ‘exit doors’” —ways to retain a civilian nuclear program while guaranteeing there would be no bomb.
I certainly hope that's right. I was at the conference, though, and though all points of view were represented, there was an overall dovish tone (Iran's ambassador to the UN even spoke via teleconference, but I unfortunately had to miss him) so this sort of sentiment is what the audience wanted to hear. That Burns was interested in showing up at all, however, was certainly a good sign. I would have more faith, though, if this sort of message were going to a different audience.
Oh, man. So as you may recall, I would like to see Washington, DC's handgun ownership ban significantly weakened. I also wouldn't mind having some congressional representation. Well, Democrats in congress had cooked up a plan to get me some. Instead of zero senators and zero members of the House, we were going to get bumped up to zero senators and one member of the House. But then along comes Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas who "proposed sending the bill back to committee with additional language gutting the city's gun restrictions" (that liberal media, I guess). So then "Democrats retreated, fearing that conservative, pro-gun members of their party could be tempted to side with Republicans."
Thus, though I appeared to be on the very verge of getting both congressional representation and a handgun, for now, at least, I have to settle for neither.
I feel like all while Yao was injured, people were saying things like "if Yao and McGrady are both healthy, Houston's going ot be a team nobody wants to face in the playoffs." It became, you know, a cliché. But now that Yao's been back a bit and Houston's been winning these games you have to consider the possibility that this cliché may be, you know, true. I could see these guys beating any of the West's Big Three. Not that this proves anything per se but head over to 82games.com and check out the performance of the Yao/Hayes/Battier/McGrady/Alston "we're all healthy" lineup.
It's long been observed among the smart set that Americans are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. Americans, in short, favor lower taxes and smaller government. There just aren't any particular programs whose budgets they think should be reduced. They think we need to get big government regulations off our backs, but politicians win plaudits for proposing new ones all the time. Well, Chris Bowers observes that one finding of the giant recently released Pew survey (PDF) is that this may be changing.
The question of the hour is "If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" Back in 1996, there was a 61-30 split in favor of fewer services. By today, that's down to a 45-43 split. When you consider that even in the 61-30 split era, Bill Clinton was able to win re-election "Medicare, Medicaid, Education and the Environment" the dawn of a new era of parity on the generic size of government question may well herald a bold new era of big government.
Another interesting finding: "Views of many corporations vary significantly among Democrats along class lines. Two-thirds of working-class Democrats have a favorable view of Wal-Mart compared with 45% of professional-class Democrats."
"Why not do away with all the mandatory drug trials and the like, and simply let drug companies purchase approval for new drugs," asks Tyler Cowen. "Think of the companies as posting bonds, and of course they still can be sued ex post if the drug harms somebody. The companies still will have reason to conduct their own tests." Color me skeptical, but I'm no expert on the FDA approval process. The larger point, however, is that if you want to know why America is so lawsuit-heavy, you need to blame libertarians like Tyler. You can regulate or you can litigate; the less we have of the former, the more we need of the latter.
Michael O'Hare: "The Stern report suggests that the cost of a real global warming strategy is going to be equivalent to about a 1% tax on all prices of everything everywhere . . . we're going to need biofuels, more nuclear power, more windmills, and all that for sure, but we are also going to need to do without a lot of stuff, or our grandchildren are going to do without a lot of beaches, coastal cities, water, and the like."
I think it's worth being clear on something here. The proposition that we should take bold action against global climate change isn't a proposal that people in 2026 should have less stuff than people in 2006 for the sake of preserving the environment in 2046. Rather, the proposal is that people in 2026 should have less additional stuff relative to 2006-people than they would otherwise have had were we to just ignore the problem. This isn't a trivial cost, but it's not what comes to mind when phrases like "we are . . . going to need to do without a lot of stuff" come to mind. Barring catastrophe, the world will continue to get wealthier over time even if stiff carbon-reduction policies that make energy more expensive are implemented.
"The Iranian military seized 15 British naval personnel in the waters off Iraq early this morning, the British Ministry of Defence said today in a statement posted to its Web site." Here's the Washington Post story. Here's the UK MOD's statement. This sort of thing is why it's so unnerving to live in a country where one gets the sense that substantial elements of the US government would welcome a war with Iran were appropriate circumstances to arise.
I've been a little lax on the US Attorney front, figuring the TPM superteam has it covered, but it's always worth drawing attention to the screwed up dynamics of the American right which, naturally, touch this story as well as all others. As noted in my diavlog with Byron York, many conservatives have hated Alberto Gonzalez for years (he's insufficiently fanatical about aboriton and affirmative action), which has created some space for rightwingers to agree that, at a minimum, something smells here. Thus, Charles Krauthammer and K-Lo say Alberto should go.
In steps Andy McCarthy to circle the wagons in an impressive tangle of non-sequiteurs and illogic.
Mark Schmitt offers up some good mockery of Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton pollster and top political strategist. "I really am not against Senator Clinton or her presidential candidacy," Schmitt writes "But I really would like to be rid of Mark Penn and the kind of unimaginative, narrow -- and narrowing -- thinking that he signifies in American politics." This I don't quite understand. Clearly, Clinton -- Mark Penn and all -- is superior to Rudy Giuliani or John McCain or what have you. But the good thing about a primary is you get to choose from a menu of options, all of which have at least some appeal. Under the circumstances if you believe, as Schmitt and I do, that Penn and his way of thinking about politics have been very detrimental to the country, I think you have to take this as a very good reason to hope that the person he works for doesn't secure the nomination. We won't "be rid of" Penn either way, but we really won't be rid of him if Clinton wins the nomination; instead, he'll be one of the main architects of party-wide political strategy.
Near the beginning of the health care section of her diavlog with Jon Chait, Megan McArdle correctly observes that no one health care system can serve every person as well as they might be served, and then says "What you're looking for is the average or the median." Jon gives this the old "right, right" hoping to move on to more debatable concerns, but I think it is worth saying that a health care system that this is less obviously true than one might think. Simply abolishing Medicaid would, after all, have no real impact on the typical middle-class, middle-aged American and would leave room for him to pay lower taxes. It would just be, you know, wrong.
A lot of the time, I feel like the health care debate gets a little unduly technocratic. It's unlikely that there's such a thing as a unique "best" health care system in the sense of "system that works best." Value issues about allocation of resources to health care versus to other things, and about allocation of health care resources to whom both come into play.
The disappointing-but-still-worth-voting-for Iraq supplemental passed the house. Dems voting "no" from a left perspective are Michaud (ME), Woolsey, Lee, Lewis, Kucinich, Waters, Watson, and McNulty (NY). Dems votin "no" from a right perspective are Taylor (LA), Marshall (GA), Matheson (Utah), Boren (OK), Lincoln Davis (TN), Barrow (GA). Only two Republicans -- Gilchrist (MD) and Jones (NC) -- voted yes. This is the crux of the matter. Unless Congressional Republicans fear that continuing to vote for the war will cost them their seats and therefore turn against the White House, congress realistically can't force Bush to end the war. If you happen to be represented by someone who voted "no," you should really call or write in.
I've sort of laid off the Spine-blogging, since if Martin Peretz doesn't own The New Republic anymore it's not obvious what his significance is, but I guess he's still got the editor in chief title and his latest post is a very nice example of deliberate efforts to foster anti-Arab sentiments in the United States. The post begins with some rhetorical questions: "Is there no limit to the barbarity of which Iraqi Arabs are capable? None?" Peretz then offers up a story of behavior that really is awful. Why, though, is this supposed to tell us specifically about the bararism level of Iraqi Arabs? Why not Iraqis? To be sure, it wasn't done by a Kurd. But neither was it done by the overwhelming majority of Arab Iraqis. And, certainly, we know that Germans are capable of running a concentration camp, that Russians will run a GULAG, that Americans will enslave millions and exterminate a continent's native inhabitants. The human capacity for "barbaric" behavior is, in short, quite large and Iraqi Arabs, like the rest of us, sometimes do awful things.
To Peretz, though, this is not an illustration of a point about humanity or of a point about this particular war that he helped unleash, but specifically a point about Arabs. "This, of course, is a result of Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians," he snarks at the end. It's clear, though, that nobody of consequence is making the argument Peretz objects to here. Rather, it's Peretz who wants to drag the Palestinians into the conversation, advancing his view that Palestinians, as members of the larger and uniquely barbaric Arab tribe, must be treated roughly by civilized folk.
With all due respect (which is to say very little), Jonah Goldberg seems confused as to why liberals aren't attempting to offer well-informed, soberly-reasoned critiques of his "very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." The reason is this: The book is in no way intended to be a serious commentary deserving of serious responses from serious liberals.
Consider: The cover image is a smiley face with a Hitler moustache drawn on it. The subtitle is The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. The publicity material states clearly that "LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment–and rousing cheers from the Right." Everything about the book, in short, suggests that it's just meant to poke liberals in the eye in order to provoke howls of rage that will, thereby, garner higher sales on the theory that all conservatives really care about is pissing off liberals. Which is fine, if that's what Goldberg wants to do. But, obviously, if you make it clear that you're not interested in a serious discussion of the issues at hand you're not going to generate a serious discussion of the issues at hand. I'll note for the record that Sherri Berman makes a provocative argument about the relationship of fascism to contemporary social democracy in The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century, although she does so specifically in the context of arguing for what I would regard is an exaggerated account of the distinctiveness of social democracy from liberalism.
There's much wisdom in what Kevin Drum writes here, but I think he's wrong to believe that public opinion growing more tolerant and socially progressive heralds an era in which right-wing culture war tactics will grow less politically effective. If anything, the reverse. Culture war battles overwhelmingly involve the left throwing the first shot, then getting burned politically as the right fire back, and then winning the substantive battle. After all, as long as public opinion on race was sufficiently conservative that there was no meaningful pressure on politicians to back civil rights, racial backlash politics were useless. Similarly, there was no political mobilization around banning abortions until pubic opinion became sufficiently pro-choice to make political mobilization around legalizing abortions seem like a reasonable way to spend your time.
And, again, as long as public opinion was massively hostile to gay rights, there was no use in trying to use anti-gay sentiment as a tool of political mobilization. Liberals will win the gay marriage battle soon enough, but then some new thing will come along. Besides race, after all, the overwhelming majority of these fights have had to do with traditional ideas about gender roles. Clearly, adherence gender norms has become much more relaxed over the past 40-50 years. At the same time, however, we've hardly emerged as a behaviorally androgynous society. Kwame Anthony Appiah used to point out in seminar that he could guess the sex of the students around the table pretty accurately simply by looking at everyone's shoes. Which isn't to say that we're going to have a political fight over shoes per se (just as there was never a "women can wear pants now" legislative fight during which moderates brokered a compromise appending "but their pants should be tighter than men's pants" to the text) but we've got all these "mommy wars," hook-up controversies, etc. to keep chewing over.
So, I'm thinking to myself, what other kind of basketball stats garbage can I blog about? This is what I came up with. Assemble the All-PER and All-WP48 teams! See more below the fold.
I do recognize that all of the big polling firms do corporate work. But surely someone should ask Hillary Clinton how she feels about her top pollster/strategist running a union-busting division. "Companies cannot be caught unprepared by Organized Labor’s coordinated campaigns whether they are in conjunction with organizing or contract negotiating," says Mark Penn's firm, "That is why we have developed a comprehensive communications approach for clients when they face any type of labor situation." Just what the Democratic Party ordered!
UPDATE: This is, for example, a good thing to discuss at, say, tonight's SEIU candidate's forum.
Jonathan Cohn writes about how he learned to stop worrying and love the frontloaded primary schedule. I agree that nostalgia for the primaries of yore is misguided. Personally, though I recognize that a single nationwide primary would have its downsides, insofar as we're going to have primaries at all I think it's the way to go. I worry, however, that front-loading may be leading us to a system where the winner of the Iowa Caucuses de facto wins the nomination. That, I think, would be a terrible result since the Iowa system, which puts a premium on pure field organizing and leaves the number of delegates you win only very loosely related to your level of support, is really and truly pernicious. Now it's hard to say if this is really what's happening, maybe 2004 was just a freak exception, but I worry.
I'm proud to say that last night I largely eschewed the popular spring amateur basketball competition in favor of watching Kobe Bryant make history by joining Wilt Chamberlain as only the second person to score over 50 points in four straight games. The feat reminded me that instead of constructing elaborate rating systems, I wish statistically inclined NBA fans would do something like look at the game-to-game variance displayed by different players. So Kobe averages 1.5 more points per game than does 'Melo. But whose median score is higher? Is "consistency" a real attribute of players -- like some guys' FG percentages operate within a narrow band while others go "hot" and "cold" game to game? I'd rather here about that stuff than endless debates about the proper weighting of rebounding in overall player assessment.
Garance put up a post yesterday evening that I thought was a bit of a low blow, suggesting that Sam Rosenfeld, Ezra Klein, and I all just don't like Hillary Clinton because we're men. I don't want to get into that, but I think it's a good entry into what I think is the very most crucial part of our argument: Nobody's entitled to a presidential nomination. The vast majority of Democrats will not be the presidential nominee in 2008. Even if you restrict yourself to the universe of current Democratic Senators and Governors the vast majority will not be the presidential nominee in 2008. The vast majority won't even run. This group of people who won't be the nominee includes Democrats I admire greatly, Democrats I find somewhat problematic, Democrats I know nothing about, etc. It doesn't, however, suggest any particular animus against these people to reach the conclusion that the conventional wisdom is correct and these people shouldn't be the nominee.
Rather, to reach the conclusion that someone should be the nominee, you need to have some strong affirmative arguments in their favor. In Clinton's case, you would need to convince me that there are some important issues where she's likely to make a better president than would the available alternatives, and/or that she has some clear electability edges. And I don't really see it. I don't think she has any obvious electoral strengths vis-a-vis Obama or (especially) Edwards. On domestic issues, I think she'll mostly be fine but her instincts and those of her political team seem to lie squarely in the camp that thinks Democrats should try to govern from a defensive crouch. On national security policy I think she's shown less inclination than Edwards or (especially) Obama to substantially overhaul the Bush administration's grand strategy rather than putting it under new management.
In a perfect world, I would not like to spend very much time criticizing a politician who fits that profile. Lots of Senators, from Patty Murray to Jack Reed to Ken Salazar and beyond have their flaws. I don't, however, obsessively harp on those flaws unless circumstances push those flaws to the forefront of the public agenda. Clinton, however, obviously thrust herself and her merits and flaws to the forefront of the national agenda by announcing her presidential campaign. What's more, as the front-runner by a substantial margin, there's really nothing to be done except point out those flaws. Which, I think, is too bad. She's been subjected to a lot of frankly demented criticism over the years, a lot of unfair news coverage, a lot of misogyny and tons of other stuff I don't care to be associated with. I'm very glad that she beat Rick Lazio. I think it's quite possible that had she not entered that race, either he or Rudy Giuliani would have won that Senate seat which would have been a much worse outcome. And she seems to me to have a better grasp of policy than most of her Senate colleagues. All good things.
But, still, it doesn't make sense to just set up a presumption that she should be the nominee and then start wondering what's wrong with everyone who won't get on board.
Woman reading the paper sipping coffee: "What does Valerie Plame do?" Boyfriend: "What, the actress?" Woman: "I don't think so." Boyfriend: "Well, which one?" Woman: "I don't know, that's why I'm asking what she does." Boyfriend: "Well, I don't know." Pause Woman: "We should go to Paris."
And, in fact, they probably should -- Paris is great.
"I can't ever let my health insurance expire, or I'm not sure I'll ever be able to get it again." That's what a friend remarked to me last night, not in the midst of a conversation about health care policy, but just talking about life. This is, I think, one important point missing from Tyler Cowen's discussion of health care in the US and France. I'm not personally in that particular situation, but it's a major, major drawback of the American system. It's absurd to live in a country where people with some medical history feel they need to live without ever having a bigger-than-COBRA-sized gap in their employment history. It's bad for the economy, and it's bad for society. There's also, as I suggested yesterday, the small matter of justice, equity, etc.
To me, this is the starting point -- a strong, potentially defeasible, presumption that the American health care system is unjust and plagued with deleterious systematic effects on our economy and society. Now, obviously, one could also point out that the distribution of luxury cars in our society is pretty inequitable. But on the flipside, one could produce clear and convincing evidence that non-market auto-distribution methods produce unsatisfactory results. Similarly, if it were clearly the case that moving to an alternative health care model would have a devastating impact on American public health or inevitably cause a budgetary meltdown, I might need to revise my view. At some level, these debates about international comparisons start to get very hair splitty. Whatever you make of them, however, they clearly don't show that. They also indicate that very few countries have attempted to pump American levels of money into a health care system, so it's hard to know which factors are creating the differences in health care (I'm not sure how we're supposed to speculate as to what UK health care would look like of the NHS budget were tripled) and we do know that health care per se has a pretty small impact on public health.
I have to say that I don't totally understand the causal mechanism this article is describing, but apparently some provision of a Medicaid law passed before the election is causing birt h control prices to skyrocket on college campuses. That's, um, bad and hopefully the new congress will change it back.
Then there is the sudden cancellation of Ahmadi-Nezhad's trip to the UN . . . Ahmadi-Nezhad might be afraid that Rafsanjani could steal a beat on him, and so A-N had better . . . a couple of months ago A-N promised a major announcement
Really? Ahmadi-Nezhad? Next will we be doing it in the Farsi alphabet ? Like so -- محمود احمدینژاد -- I dunno if that HTML will work, but look at his Wikipedia page.
UPDATE: There's no such thing as a "Farsi alphabet" -- you use a somewhat modified version of the Arabic script.
Zbigniew Brzezinski attacks the phrase. Increasingly, I'm inclined to agree that it's a problem. Peter Beinart, for example, has a very good column in the current Time that winds up striking a false note at one point. "While Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam, McGovern promised to end the cold war itself," he writes, "He called for cutting the defense budget 37% and withdrawing troops not only from South Vietnam but also from South Korea." This is an important point, and Beinart is correct to note the contrast with contemporary political debates, but he winds up expressing it like this: "While many conservatives see anti-Iraq Democrats as McGovern's spawn, they're a very different breed. Pelosi and Reid aren't against the war on terrorism."
Mickey Kaus explains why he's afraid of debating Ezra Klein. I also earn Kaus' praise, which probably won't endear me to my netroots fan base. To regain anti-Kaus street cred, let me note that he reads a New York Times story that he thinks is unduly favorable to John McCain calls it liberal bias. There's no doubt that the press has, for years, suffered from a pro-McCain bias. It may even have been somewhat plausible in 2000 to chalk the McCain love up to liberalism (but then how to explain the press' hatred for Al Gore) but as time goes by don't you eventually need to just recognize that reporters like John McCain?
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Heads in the Sand
