Reading Matthew Dowd's tale of lost faith I'm left curious as to what he could have been thinking during Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. Given what he thinks now, what about the situation in 2004 made him feel so differently that he wanted to quite literally dedicate his life to perpetuating Bush's hold on power. Pretty much all the factors Dowd cites were perfectly clear by the time of the election. One can imagine it taking a while for the message to sink into the head of someone as invested in Bush as Dowd was, but shouldn't there be a momement when you're not exactly ready to jump off the bus but aren't comfortable driving the bus either?
Never fear -- the Fred Thompson campaign is here: "'I am the reliable conservative,' he asserted." The thing of it is -- he's right. He is the reliable conservative and since the only obstacle to his electability just is his reliable conservatism, I don't think his opponents are going to be able to stop him from winning the GOP nomination.
UPDATE: Shit! Wrong Thompson! The thing about Tommy Thompson is that in a just world, he (or maybe George Voinovich) would have been the GOP nominee in 2000. Evidently, he's old news now and I doubt he'll win.
If Brendan Nyhan really intends to keep cataloguing bogus GOP tax cut talking points, he's going to be a busy man indeed. I wonder -- I really do -- from time to time why newspapers are uniformly so willing to be manipulated by these obvious deceptions. Have they not noticed that newspaper circulation is in perpetual decline? That young people don't pay for their products? Do they really not see the possibility that this is related to the way they are regularly complicit in efforts to mislead their readers? Who wants to pay for misinformation?
I'm struck not only be the English language competence on display here, but by Dutch familiarity with the US cable television environment. Also note that, as is frequently the case with conservatives, Bill O'Reilly's support for the second amendment doesn't seem to extend to scary black men.
"MY . . . had a couple months where 'imminent war with Iran' in every other post, and now that there's an actual crisis with Iran that may involve a war starting in less than a week, there's nothing," thus Sprach Mr. Noah. There's not much to say. I think I've made it clear where I stand on the merits of unilateral military strikes as an approach to Iran's nuclear program (short version: don't do it) and I haven't seen any big new arguments out there worth talking about. The British hostage crisis is actually making me less worried that strikes will actually be forthcoming.
Precisely the sort of thing I was worried about was that having ratched-up the confrontation level, Bush would seize on the inevitable Iranian countermeasures as a casus belli. Even with his stepped-up rhetoric that really doesn't seem to me to be what's happening. News that "Blair's government appeared to be settling in for a long-term crisis but was still seeking a way to defuse it diplomatically, according to reports out of London," seems reassuring. The fly in the ointment is things like how Bush "rejected any 'quid pro quo' trade of Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq and ducked a question about whether military force would be justified to free the captured sailors" where we see once again that the president isn't interested in a serious diplomatic effort to resolve the outstanding bilateral issues in the US-Iranian relationship.
The White House seems to me to have decided to opt for paralysis, raising the confrontation level without intending to launch a war, attempting the "diplomatic option" but not attempting serious diplomacy. One is sometimes tempted to call this "the worst of both worlds" but it's actually quite a bit better than launching a war. One major problem with the Bush strategy is that it all-but-ensures that if the next president decides to strike a deal, he or she will have to do so from a weaker position. The other, of course, is that a policy of confrontation is going to breed these periodic crises and you never know when things might go too far.
New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz explains that we shouldn't be involved in trying to foster an Israeli-Palestinian peace process because "In some places in the world, conflicts are resistant to U.S. influence. Like infections that are resistant to antibiotics." Interestingly, I won't be holding my breath waiting for Peretz's column about how since the US has no influence over conflicts in that region, we may as well cut off Israel's foreign aid. Also see that he's kind of toying with analogizing Palestinians to bacteria, but doesn't quite go there. It's classy.
I have in my inbox a speech Nancy Pelosi delivered to the Knesset. This is the part about Iran. It pointedly doesn't include any silly "all options are on the table" posturing:
And together, we must have a simple message for Tehran, whose support of Hezbollah is well known. Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. The time to leverage all our power is now, and the way to do it is through diplomacy - with stronger sanctions and smarter policy choices.
Under Chairman Tom Lantos' leadership, the U.S. Congress is moving to put additional pressure on Iran by expanding and tightening our sanctions regime. I am certain that our Administration will use all of its influence with Security Council members and states in the region to see that they do the same.
Iran is not just an Israeli problem or a regional problem. Iran is a problem for the world.
I don't think that's that hard to do. It's also not all I would have to say about Iran policy, but considering the audience Pelosi seems to me to be getting this right.
On some level, I'm sure this is a joke, but still:
Ben Bradlee appealed to the audience to maintain faith in newspapers. He's not high on computers and blogs -- mostly because it's too uncomfortable to drag the computer to the john. He said "the newspaper and magazine work best in the bathroom."
I suppose I agree with that. On the other hand, I imagine that sometime in the future a device will be invented that is convenient to bring into the bathroom and that also gets the internet. Similarly, someone yesterday cited to me "you can bring it on the train" as a reason for preferring print to web. This, to my view, is an extremely compelling consideration. It's still the case that there are places where you can't get wireless broadband. On the other hand, every six months there are fewer and fewer such places. The literal newspaper -- the newsprint with the ink on it -- is clearly doomed. The question is whether specific newspaper-producing institutions like The Washington Post can provide their readers with enough additional value to maintain audiences without the benefit of the country being organized into a series of segmented local monopolies.
Capps came home complaining about Yoko Ono so, obviously, I had to unearth the Fluxus blog. I think it's kind of cool. In his defense, he's bitter because he had to miss the Suns-Mavs game which, I think, mostly proved that losing Eric Dampier is not good for Dallas. Losing Caron Butler, by contrast, is absolutely catastrophic for the Wizards; without him, we're doomed.
That John McCain now feels he should be telling easily debunked, bald-faced lies about Iraq really does make you wonder. Which seems like as good a time as any to note that Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano came by The American Prospect's offices on Friday afternoon. In talking about her state, she noted how much of the local economy is driven by defense contractors. And, indeed, as you'll see here in The Arizona Republic, "The escalating cost of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is eroding funding for some longer-term defense projects, but contractors in Arizona continue to benefit from government spending to support troops in the field."
War, in short, is good for business in Arizona. And yet, Saint John McCain's strident militarism never gets discussed on these terms -- is never seen as something on a par with how Carl Levin loves cars and Joe Biden loves credits cards.
Jerome Armstrong and Ed Kilgore talk about the Q1 fundraising numbers. The previous record was $8.9 million for Al Gore in 1999. John Edwards is far surpassing that with a $14 million haul and he's not even doing very well. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pulled in $22 million and $26 million respectively, plus Clinton gets to add $10 million already raised from her Senate account.
The moral of the story, I think, is the clearest possible indication that there isn't some fixed pool of "progressive money" that has to be fought over. Clearly, eight years of increasing levels of progressive political mobilization and progressive institution building have, combined with three candidates who each have strong appeal, are able to produce a vastly expanded pool of donations from what was out there in 1999. I think it's too bad that the frontrunner continues to be a weak choice for the nomination whose appeal, though real, doesn't really appeal to me, but it's hard not to be excited about the general ferment of people engaging with the process.
EMI says it's going to begin selling music over iTunes without annoying Digital Rights Management features on the files. Good for them. Tim Lee says if this happens "they'll have earned at least one new customer" but you can count me as a second. I don't understand why more labels don't do this. The main beneficiary of the iTunes DRM is neither the artist nor the label, but rather Apple Computer.
If you own a like of iTunes DRMed files, then you're always going to want to use an iPod as your MP3 player because only an iPod will play your files. And then, having invested in an iPod, you're only going to want to buy music from iTunes since only iTunes will play files that run on your iPod. The result, over time, would simply be to make Apple a more important music industry player than are any of the record labels. EMusic, which offers DRM-free downloads, is really a much better long-run strategy for the record labels even though so far only indie labels have been smart enough to figure it out.
There was this blog dust-up last week involving Jonah Goldberg, Andrew Sullivan, and Ross Douthat all kicking around some ideas from a David Brooks column and since two of the participants are smart, interesting writers it made for good reading. Goldberg wrapped things up: "[Ross is] biased toward new ideas, I'm inclined toward being a stick in the mud." Ross let things go at that, but the difference, clearly, is that Goldberg -- like a lot of people drawn to the conservative movement -- is drawn to it specifically because a faux-Burkean fussy aversion to "new ideas" provides a decent cover for the fact that he lacks the capacity to grapple with actual ideas.
Which is fine. His role in the conservative movement is as a propagandist -- smugly policing the ideological orthodoxy, slandering the opposition, and offering up brilliant sophistry like this reply to Ben Adler's assertion that NR's Planet Gore blog is "devoted entirely to stopping any reasonable movement to prevent climate change." Are you ready? Here's Goldberg's counterargument: "there is no such thing as a "reasonable" movement to prevent climate change because climate changes by definition. Saying we can prevent climate change is like saying we can prevent tides, tectonic drift, or rain. And no one would say any movement to stop rain is 'reasonable.'"
Yes, Jonah, we surrender! Your powers of deliberate obtuseness are too strong for us liberals!
You may have read Keelin McDonell or Kriston Capps on the scandals at the Smithsonian Institution that forced Lawrence Small's resignation. Nevertheless, it was still somewhat shocking that when I went with Young Nick to the Natural History museum on Friday, we saw this on display:
In (sort of) defense of the museum, this panel was more-or-less part of a human evolution display that was marked with a disclaimer explaining that the science was outdated and that the museum was hoping to get a new exhibit up soon. Worst of all, I've now been forced to choose between posting this funny photo and the knowledge that people will seize upon it to try to discredit contemporary global warming science. For the record, here's a good place to start on the difference between the highly speculative "global cooling" scare of the 1970s and the much firmer, more widespread global warming consensus of today.
Matt Stoller does the key media criticism pushback on Jonathan Weisman's article about how politically risky it is for Democrats to challenge Bush's unpopular indefinite detention policies (my quick hint to congressional reporters would be that if you can't even get Steny Hoyer to fret in public that liberals are going too far, you need to come up with a new story). It's worth reading down to the end so you see how lame some of the GOP talking points are.
"The idea that we would import dangerous terrorists, like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, into American communities is dangerous," says Duncan Hunter, who's apparently unfamiliar with our nation's fine federal prison system which includes several facilities designed specifically for the purpose of detaining dangerous individuals and separating them from the larger community. This is not the stuff of which good scare stories are made.
Larry Kudlow defends the Laffer Curve against its critics: "Now, the Congressional Budget Office would try to argue that these revenues are lower than would have been the case if taxes had not been cut. But who’s to say? Economic growth would’ve been slower and hence revenues without tax cuts might have been lower." Who, indeed, other than, perhaps, the staff economists at the Congressional Budget Office who are trained to make such calculations. One can try to argue, I suppose, that it's per se illegitimate to mount any kind of argument about historical counterfactuals. This will, however, render it impossible to make any claims about causation.
There is, in fact, a method available for teasing out the answer to this riddle. We look at the actual level of tax revenue. Then we look at what the level of tax revenue would have been under higher tax rates assuming no growth effect. Then we look at how much lower growth would have had to have been for revenues under the counterfactual scenario to have been lower than revenues under the action scenario. Last, we must ask ourselves if we are in possession of any plausible account of why the higher-rate path would have generated such low growth. Neither the CBO nor any other credible individual or institution has produced such a model, which is why we're left with Kudlow's hand waving and "who's to say?" nonsense.
I certainly agree with Clive James that Leon Trotsky was a bad man and a Communist, but is it really true that there are lots of people "who even today persist in seeing him as some sort of liberal democrat; or, if not as that, then as a true champion of the working class." James doesn't have any, you know, examples of such people. But if you're out there it's true -- Trotsky and Stalin fell out over interpersonal rivalries and Trotsky's view that Stalin was proceeding too slowly with collectivization. That said, this seems a little pointless. Will Slate pay me to write some anti-Nazi articles?
A.M., a reader from abroad, suggests that while someone of my demographic may not know many Trotskyites, the sort of view Clive James is opposed to is more heavily represented in intellectual circles abroad. He cites as an example things like this Guardian column excoriating Communism's critics as hypocrites and arguing that "the particular form of society created by 20th-century communist parties will never be replicated. But there are lessons to be learned from its successes as well as its failures."
This may be so. Still, it seems to me to all the more clearly make the point that if you're going to start slamming Trotskyism as a major force in intellectual life you ought to find some examples of Trotskyites you're criticizing. It's also worth noting an ambiguity here in terms of people of leftish sympathies who say nice things about people who don't deserve praise. On the one hand, you might have someone who says he admires Trotsky but is actually admiring a false notion of what Trotsky stood for -- an imagined Russian democratic socialist purged unjustly by the villainous Stalin. On the other hand, you might have someone who admires the actual Trotsky -- a violent revolutionary and ardent advocate of dictatorial rule. Since most people's understanding of Russian history is pretty weak, I can see how a lot of people might be confused about the specific issues at hand in the Trotsky-Stalin dispute, which is different from saying a lot of people are advocates of the militarization of labor.
Choe Sang-Hun reports for The New York Times of the US-Korea trade deal that "The agreement marks a significant victory for the Bush administration, which needed a prominent deal with clear benefits for American producers to shore up support for bilateral trade pacts with Panama, Peru and Colombia, which have thus far received a cool reception from a skeptical Congress." Why would a deal with clear benefits for American producers shore up support for other trade pacts? Either the producers think those other pacts will benefit them, in which case they'll be supported, or else they won't, in which case they won't be. At least that's what I would do. Who cares whether or not the South Korea deal benefitted me -- I should assess my position on each deal on its own terms?
I also have to remark that Bush seems to me to have pursued a rather idiosyncratic version of trade policy that represents interest-group brokerage at its worst with little in the way of an underlying rationale or principle other than whichever set of companies happens to have been lobbying the loudest.
In this edition, I defend the vlogging medium from the scurrilous attacks of young Nick Yglesias. Let me also note that YouTube's feature where video needs to be "processed" after uploading is really annoying and Julian Sanchez correctly pointed out to me that using Google Video lets you escape this.
Ever wondered about that implausible-sounding Coriolis Effect business? Well, I have. And thanks to the magic of Adium and Brian Beutler's trip to Argentina we were able to conduct a little experiment:
So, having been disabused of the Coriolis disinformation for a few years now, Matt and I conducted a (wasteful) experiment. It turns out that when you fill up and drain my kitchen sink here in Buenos Aires it drains clockwise. AND, perhaps evidince of swirl-rumor confirmation, Matt's toilet flushes counter clockwise. But nothing's ever that simple. Because my toilet down here flushes counter clockwise as well.
I have no idea how regular hemisphere-wide toilet-flush trends are, and if there is a physical explanation, I have no idea what it is. My guess would be that swirl direction is purely a function of how the relevant pipes are structured. But I'll leave that to the blogosphere (which I know to be a trustworthy and mature resource) to decide.
I dunno. It's just too depressing, I guess, but for a while now I haven't really said much of anything about Iraq the country as opposed to Iraq the political issue. But just in time to confirm that the surge can't possibly "work" if by "work" we mean something like create a functioning pluralistic polity in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani (the good kind of Shiite theocrat, we'll recall) has come out against rolling back de-Baathification. Spencer Ackerman notes that this more-or-less marks the complete collapse of Zalmay Khalilzad's agenda in terms of bringing about political reconciliation in Iraq.
Khalilzad, it's worth saying, was the General Petraeus of his time -- the lone high-ranking administration official who actually had a good reputation and seemed as best I could tell to more-or-less deserve it. He couldn't, however, deliver the goods. Not through any particular fault of his own except that he was a diplomat rather than a magician. Just as Petraeus is only a general, only a man, only an American, not someone capable of conjuring the social bases of a liberal pluralistic Iraq out of the ether.
I find myself heartened by Multiple Choice Mitt winning the Q1 money primary on the GOP side. It seems like his campaign is dead, and this cash will just go to tarnishing his rivals. And even if that's wrong, he strikes me as both a less formidable general election candidate than Rudy Giuliani and would probably be a less pernicious president, depending on exactly how much of his bizarre war-related rhetoric he actually believes. Josh Marshall observed yesterday that no politician can afford to appear ridiculous and speculated that John McCain Baghdad stroll was his moment of tipping into the ridicule zone.
Romney, I think, comes almost pre-approved as ridiculous. The fact that his campaign seems somewhat ashamed to admit that their fundraising success is related to Mormons being excited about the idea of a Mormon president doesn't, to me, indicate that this operation is really going to get off the ground even with all the cash.
Greg Sargent and Eric Kleefeld conducted a side-by-side comparison of votes cast by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama since Obama joined the Senate in January 2005 and discovered that their records are essentially identical. Max Blumenthal opines in The Nation that "In no way does Sargent and Kleefeld's study negate the importance of Obama's oppositon to invading Iraq, but it does add some nuance to an otherwise simplistic debate."
I think a better thing to say was that the Sargent/Kleefeld study demonstrates what anyone who follows politics for a while will quickly see -- voting records don't tell you all that much about where politicians' stand. In the contemporary world both parties remain overwhelmingly united on the overwhelming majority of votes; the Democratic leadership tries to outline positions that all its members will support and the GOP leadership tries to outline positions that mainstream Democrats will oppose in an effort to put pressure on a handful of vulnerable members representing "red" areas. What's more, to really add nuance to the debate, you'd need to produce some example of Obama being less neoconnish than Clinton and I've never seen that. Obama appears to have an advisory team drawn disproportionately from the ranks of Iraq War opponents whereas Clinton is the reverse; Obama's AIPAC speech was somewhat less fanatically devoted to the cause; etc., etc., etc.
Not to level any particular charges at Blumenthal, but it does seem to me that at some point the Clinton camp needs to stop trying to blur the differences between her foreign policy views and Obama's and, instead, defend her views as better superior to his.
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
I clicked the link and read the whole Mankiw post to see if there was some specific controversy over public policy to which this parable was supposed to speak, but there isn't.
This, to my mind, is this most annoying tick of right-of-center economic punditry -- the tendency to produce arguments in favor of some form of liberal democratic capitalism and then brandish them as argments in favor of the specific policy proposals favored by those who want to take the most laissez faire of liberal democracies and take it even further in an extreme direction. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think liberals do the reverse. I don't think that if I constructed a witty anecdote proving that the government needs to have more than zero revenue that, say, Kevin Drum would hail this as a brilliant aperçu rather than something oddly banal to be blogging about. Naturally, one can, in principle, go too far in terms of soaking the rich (a specific example of doing so I would cite is the policy environment in Sweden) but what does this have to do with anything? Would a return to the level of taxation prevailing in 1999 or even 1994 really lead to dramatic economic collapse with Bill Gates fleeing to Andorra to take refuge?
"I regard myself as a supply-sider for sure," Rudy Giuliani told Larry Kudlow on March 27, "I watched Ronald Reagan do it and learned it, saw it work. Taxes get reduced, more revenue comes in." Thus, my latest column:
Taxes get reduced, more revenue comes in. It's a nice idea. Nice, but not true. What's more, it's known to be untrue. Reagan did try it, but it didn't work.
Taxes get reduced, more revenue comes in. Again, this is something Republicans like to say -- but it isn't true, and people who follow politics closely all know it isn't true. Elections, however, are decided by the broad mass of voters, the vast majority of whom don't follow politics especially closely. For that, they turn to the professionals -- the corps of campaign correspondents working for the country's major newspapers and television networks.
These professionals do follow politics closely and use their years of experience in the field to write stories that provide meaningful information to their readers. Thus a person who doesn't follow politics all that closely and reads an article about how Giuliani puts a debunked theory at the heart of his economic policy will come away newly in possession of that key piece of information. "Giuliani: Crank or Liar?" reads the headline, as the author explores whether Giuliani is deliberately misleading people or just too dumb to know the truth. That's how the papers cover the story, because the papers are in the business of informing their readers about politics. It's a no-brainer.
Then he began to muse about, after a veto, "would the president have the constitutional authority to support them [the troops], anyway?" He said he's a lawyer so he wouldn't offer an opinion "off the top of his head," then he proceeded to do just that. He seemed to suggest that Bush could fund the Iraq war without Congress providing funding, but it was confusing. In an interview with a New Hampshire TV reporter after his remarks, he seemed more categorical and said, since the war had been authorized by Congress, the president has "the inherent authority to support the troops."
Lowry kindly notes that this incident "could be seized on by his critics to argue that he has a dangerously out-sized view of presidential powers." Frankly, people with an outsized view of presidential powers shouldn't be tarred by association with Giuliani, a power-hungry egomaniac who just happens to be running for president at the moment. When he was Mayor, he thought he had the power to abrogate the City Charter and illegally extend his term in office. If he winds up as Borough President of Brooklyn he'll take an outsized view of the powers of that office. The difference is that there are pretty strong institutional checks on the power of local government officials -- even mayors of giant cities -- in the United States so it didn't matter all that much that Giuliani was a power-hungry egomaniac.
Lots of Sweden defenders in the comments here. Sweden is, obviously, a fine nation and its citizens enjoy an enviable standard of living by global standards. That said, as you'll see here Sweden has clearly begun to fall behind its Nordic brethren in GDP terms and the current vogue is to site Denmark as the premiere example of the Nordic social model.
Specifically what I had in mind with regard to Sweden is that in addition to consumption and income/payroll taxes, Sweden raised money from a wealth tax that tended to cause a fair number of Sweden's highest-earning individuals to leave the country. This, it seemed to me, really was a place where the dread Laffer Curve applied, and a policy more friendly to rich people would encourage rich Swedes to keep living in Sweden and paying Swedish taxes. I was Googling around to find some "data" to back me up on this, when I discovered that plans were announced last week to drop the wealth tax. The article notes that "Several European countries have dropped taxes on wealth in the last decade, including Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland" and those three are precisely the countries that have tended to displace Sweden recently as the example of choice as the paradise of social democracy. So, you see, even Sweden thinks Sweden went too far and should become more like Denmark.
Once you read it, it genuinely seems shocking that April 2007 is the first time Commentary has published an article by Charles Murray extolling Jewish racial superiority -- it's truly a match made in heaven. Murray even stands up for the oft-maligned (in Murray-esque IQ, race, and genetics circles) intelligence of the Sephardim, thus allowing him to avoid a conflict with the publication over the possible dysgenic conquences of Israel.
Kevin Drum says it's hard to know what the candidates think about foreign policy:
Unlike in domestic policy, where candidates fight each other with dueling white papers, most of the time there just aren't very many specific, detailed foreign policy issues on which candidates disagree. It's very much a rhetorical battlespace, and one where it's very difficult to draw sharp distinctions.
There's a lot of truth to that, especially with regard to Edwards and Obama. I do think Hillary Clinton laid out a reasonably clear vision in her January 2006 speech to Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. The way I read the speech, Clinton has very serious tactical disagreements with the Bush administration, but on some level agrees with the basic Bushian idea that actively seeking the political transformation of the Arab world ought to be America's key priority. Certainly, given the opportunity to argue that there's been something fundamentally misguided with the Bush approach to the post-9/11 world, she didn't choose to do so, expressing instead qualms about the ways Bush has handled this or that, but support for the general orientation of American policy.
After intensive study, I've determined that the greatest utility of video for my blogging purposes is probably just to post music videos from bands I like. In that spirit, I've been enjoying The Postmarks' eponymous album:
So there. I will admit to some level of concern that this Bikini News concept may eventually displace other forms of information media, especially once people realize that the idea can be deployed in a non-parodic context. It makes me wonder if TV Nova in the Czech Republic is still airing the naked weather report like it did back in the nineties.
I dunno; I think they need to hire some better speechwriters at the White House. I can't believe Bush said today that "there has been no credible evidence of any wrongdoing" in the US Attorneys matter. Obviously, he needs to say there was no wrongdoing. The concern is about wrongdoing not evidence of wrongdoing. This is just an invitation for more investigations.
In case you're wondering what the health care debate will look like if Democrats win the election, note David Boaz observing the alleged irony that John Edwards "supports a national health care system that would deny families the right to choose their own doctor."
This is just straight-up false -- nothing in Edwards' plan would do that. Nor, of course, do very many people have the right to choose their own doctor if they want their health insurance to cover it. Under Edwards' plan, however, there will be the choice of "a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare" which would offer such a right.
Nancy Pelosi, as you may have heard, has gone to Syria to, among other things, meet with the leaders of that country, one with which the United States officially has diplomatic relations but which the Bush administration has been seeking to coerce into adopting a more cooperative attitude through the cunning method of . . . refusing to meet with its leaders and saying mean things about them. Before going to Syria, Pelosi was in Israel, a country whose leaders are apparently afraid that there's going to be an accidental war with Syria over a mix-up in which the Syrians think the Israelis are planning to attack them. Israel, unlike the United States, has no diplomatic relations with Syria and thus Pelosi "will deliver a message of calm from Israel." But not, of course, if the Bush administration gets its way! Greg Djerejian remarks:
Bush remonstrates dastardly Nancy for her passage through Damascus, at the very time the Israelis are reportedly using her to pass a message to Bashar Assad to help avoid a possible conflagration with the Syrians. Soon, Bush will be telling Bibi Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman they're wimps, and to hang Crawford tough against the 'Palis' or such. This is all so pitiable, isn't it? How many more months left of this bungling amateurism and fake machismo do we have left? 22, is it? Sigh.
The whole thing is, of course, ridiculous. This is exactly the sort of thing we maintain a State Department for . . . so that the Speaker of the House doesn't need to conduct America's regional diplomacy by herself and get all-but called a traitor for her efforts.
So you know how very young infants are in a "critical period" of brain development when all these synapses are forming and what happens then is the most important thing in determining your whole life. Not so says Sara Mead:
There's a problem, however, with the new conventional wisdom about building brighter babies: It's based on misinterpretations and misapplications of brain research. While neural connections in babies' brains grow rapidly in the early years, adults can't make newborns smarter or more successful by having them listen to Beethoven or play with Einstein-inspired blocks. Nor is there any neuroscience evidence that suggests that the earliest years are a singular window for growth that slams shut once children turn three. To the contrary, the social programs with the strongest evidence of positive long-term impacts, including high-quality preschool programs, take place outside the zero-to-three window.
Enough metavlogging (for the moment! I'm working on a hot new film that'll hopefully be released fairly soon) and back to vlogging as it was meant to be -- diavlogging. Yes! Without those useful flash players or blog embeds on BloggingHeadsTV. Yglesias and Douthat in an express 30 minute edition, talking mostly about the sad-sack GOP field. While you're over there, I found Mark Schmitt and Rosa Brooks on raising girls in the "post-feminist" era pretty fascinating; perhaps they specially calibrated their discussion of this topic to appeal to the childless male demographic, but I'm actually betting most people would like it even more than I did.
I see some BHTV commenters are already confused by the t-shirt I'm wearing in the diavlog. That's a classic original "Free Darko" shirt courtesy of the Free Darko blog. Darko Milicic was selected second overall in the excellent 2003 NBA draft (ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade, and Josh Howard, among others) by the Detroit Pistons who famously kept him chained on the pine while fellow members of his draft class were working there way to superstardom. The shirt itself is now outdated as Darko was freed thanks to a trade to Orlando which has given him the playing time needed to establish himself as an utterly mediocre player.
It seems to me that the White House has blundered, once again, by forgetting, once again, that the Democrats aren't helpless anymore in the face of slander.
When Pelosi gets back from her trip, the House Foreign Affairs Committee ought to hold a hearing at which Pelosi and the Republican visitors to Damascus are invited to speak. If the Republicans show up, they should be asked about the White House role in setting up their trip. If they don't show up, so much the better.
He suggests that members of the Iraq Study Group, which recommended an opening to Syria, also be invited. The plan would work better, however, were House Foreign Affairs not chaired by Tom Lantos who agrees with the administration's inane Syria policy and held hearings in January where he teamed up with his odious GOP countertpart Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to attack the ISG members from the right. I think, in short, you'd have to do it in Senate Foreign Affairs or else some other committee. But it's still a good idea.
The report is still early and a bit vague but Ahmadenijad seems to have said he'll be releasing the captured British sailors. "Also Wednesday, Iran's state media reported that an Iranian envoy will be allowed to meet five Iranians detained by U.S. forces in northern Iraq since January."
Tom Friedman returns to his roots, hyping globalization success stories. Today's edition focuses on KenCall, which does call center and related kinds of offshore outsourcing for American firms. Like any good offshoring scheme, it exploits a large wage wedge. "KenCall’s employees can make in a month what half of Kenya’s population makes in a year: around $350," writes Friedman, "They get health care and free transportation." In short, by Kenyan standards this is a good job to have, but it's still way cheaper than hiring anyone in the first world. The founders are "the half-English, half-Kenyan Nicholas Nesbitt, his brother Eric and his brother-in-law Stephen Liggins" who made money on Wall Street and then "decided to come home and see if they could do good for their country and for themselves by taking advantage of Kenya’s large pool of educated, English-speaking talent to break into the outsourcing industry."
One problem was that Kenya didn't have an undersea fiber-optic connection, so you needed satellite internet "which is more expensive to begin with and was made even more so by the fact that the Kenyan state phone company had a monopoly." The government opened satellite internet up to competition so the overhead got cheap enough to make the venture profitable and they did it. Now "the Kenyan government is now working feverishly to get connected to the global fiber-optic network, via an undersea cable, which would make bandwidth here cheap and plentiful enough for all sorts of outsourcing."
Suppose the government succeeds, though, what happens next? The reason KenCall works is that its wages are so low. Its wages, in turn, are low because in Kenya at the moment the IT infrastructure necessary to operate a call center is very scarce relative to the level of English competency necessary to work in one. If an undersea cable makes it significantly easier to start up call centers, that may change. It all depends on how large Kenya's "large pool of educated, English-speaking talent" really is. Wikipedia says two percent of Kenyans get higher education, and about 43 percent of the population is under 14, so the pool isn't actually that huge. And, yes, it seems you need to go to college to work in a KenCall call center.
Barack Obama sure raised a lot of money from an awful lot of people. John Edwards, meanwhile, has leapt into second place in New Hampshire. I suppose if you've been following this blog you've noted my Obamaist sympathies. I would, however, certainly be glad to see Edwards get the nomination. The further good news is that I think the strutcure of the race at this point is that Edwards and Obama aren't really in zero-sum competition with one another but rather are both productively undermining the Clinton campaign from different directions.
Drum's snide tone is fairly representative of the left's reaction to McCain's trip. But really, how was McCain supposed to go out in Baghdad. Isn't the press being a bit unfair when it "presses" McCain on the subject of personal security? The man may well be the Republican nominee for the presidency. Any high-ranking official that goes out in Baghdad would have similar protection. When President Bush makes public appearances in this country--say to throw out the first pitch at a ball game--he, too, wears body armor. When President Clinton came to speak at Princeton while I was a student there, there were sharpshooters on the roof of my dorm. There were dozens of security personnel--for an event at Princeton.
Of course, there are places that don't require so much security. Nancy Pelosi received a "warm welcome" in Syria. And if McCain were so inclined, he could probably travel to Iran or North Korea with limited security as well. The streets in those countries are safe--that's how police states work.
Baghdad = Princeton, eh? Sure. It's really neat how today's conservatives with twist their thinking about everything under the sun around in defense of the fixed point of the war. We're now supposed to believe it's the conservative view that safe streets an exclusive feature of totalitarian police states?
I found this charming photo on NRO where they're apparently under the impression that France is a nation that's in love with headscarves. No, no, of course. They're just trying to say -- as they usually are -- that Democrats are traitors. Frankly, under the circumstances I don't think it even makes sense to bring up the fact that Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice have, like Nancy Pelosi, tended to wear headscarves when appropriate. Pelosi's demonstration that she understands the concept of good manners stands on its own two feet. The true prize pig in this fiasco, however, is Professor Reynolds who offers up this absurd notion:
Uh, huh. Since 9/11 we've seen an awful lot of bad faith efforts to deploy feminism on behalf of militarism, but this is new heights of absurdity. I think we can take it for granted that were Pelosi to start rudely thumbing her nose at traditional religious practices -- demanding a yarmulke on feminist grounds in some synagogue -- she'd get attacked for that, too. Are there any actual examples of Reynolds taking a feminist stance on anything for any reason other than to find a pretext for attacking liberals?
New Guardian column from me on the release of the Iranian hostages and the peevish reactions of America's conservative pundits:
Good news, that is, for all except America's dwindling but still hardy band of war hawks, whose hopes of leveraging the crisis into the war they crave now appear dashed. Mario Loyola, formerly a contractor working for Doug Feith's policy shop in Don Rumsfeld's defense department, whined on National Review's blog that Britain may have promised Teheran not to cooperate with any unprovoked American air attacks that may or may not be planned. Such a turn "would be an enormous victory for the mullahs," he observed, "and it shouldn't be long before they start bragging about it." The deal is "a PR win for Iran," fretted its online editor, Katherine Jean-Lopez.
As Brian Beutler writes "Two days ago we had a situation in which America was very nearly at war with Iran and Iran was holding British soldiers captive. Today we have a situation in which America is perhaps slightly less than very nearly at war with Iran and Iran will be releasing those hostages. And this, in the conservative mind of today, is somehow a bad thing."
I don't know if any of you have ever had the pleasure of experiencing a Boston winter, but if not let me awaken your senses. It's basically an 8 month-long night of sitting in your bathtub tearlessly crying while listening to Townes Van Zandt/Joy Division mashups, half-heartedly trying to cut your wrists with the Lady Bic of some jawn you were hot for that you just found out gave brain to Mr. Len in the bathroom during some poetry slam in Central Square. No. It's really like that. For everyone. 8 months.
So I read on the internet that it's wrong to make naked movies of your girlfriend and then post the results on your blog. Instead, I thought I would make a fully clothed movie of my girlfriend discussing education policy research and post that on my blog. Hot! Hot like neuroscience. Or, at least, hot like skewering misguided misrepresentations of neuroscience (if you know what I mean).
One of the odd things about appointing Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank was that one of DC's open secrets was that his girlfriend Shaha Riza worked there in the communications department. As Murray Waas reports, "Bank regulations disallow bank employees from supervising spouses or romantic partners, but Wolfowitz reportedly attempted to circumvent the rules so he would be able to continue to work with Riza." Then, in September 2005 the problem was solved by detailing Riza to the public diplomacy office in Foggy Bottom with her salary still paid by the World Bank. Then things get weird:
Before she was detailed over to the State Department, Riza was earning $132,660, according to bank records obtained by the Governmental Accountability Project. Had the bank's board adhered to its ordinary rules, as Riza was shifted over to
