Basketvlogging
Catherine and I chat at Friday's game versus the Cavs:
Not, perhaps, my finest media hour. Camerawork is by Catherine on her digital camera. I wasn't aware that those things could shoot movies but, of course, it makes sense that in a digital world the video/still dichotomy would break down.
The Grownups
The sober-minded manner in which the captive British sailors matter was handled had given me some hope that the country wasn't being run by crazy people. Not so fast, reports the Guardian, whose after-action report on the crisis states that "Pentagon officials asked their British counterparts: what do you want us to do," and "offered a series of military options" including "for US combat aircraft to mount aggressive patrols over Iranian Revolutionary Guard bases in Iran." The British government, however, wasn't looking to be used as a pretext for war, but actually wanted to handle the issue at hand. "The British declined the offer and said the US could calm the situation by staying out of it. London also asked the US to tone down military exercises that were already under way in the Gulf." Meanwhile, "The British government also asked the US administration from Mr Bush down to be cautious in its use of rhetoric, which was relatively restrained throughout."
And, well, good for Britain.
To me, the view that this affair was some kind of humiliation for the West or a PR coup for Iran is nutty and says more about the bloody-minded instincts of Americas hawks than it does about events in the world. The important issue in US-Iranian relations remains the Iranian nuclear program. One key variable here remains the attitudes of a wide swathe of countries who don't necessarily put a tremendous priority on this issue. What went down over the hostages is exactly the sort of thing likely to make policymakers in, say, Argentina or Belgium or South Korea inclined to see the Iranian regime as dangerously unpredictable and prone to envelope-pushing and the anti-Iranian coalition as being led by responsible people. Now, of course, it turns out that the anti-Iranian coalition wasn't quite as responsible as it seemed.
I Hear They're Also Funding North Korea
David Brooks offers up a fairly novel line of attack on John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt:
There seemed to be a time, after 9/11, when it was generally accepted that terror and extremism were symptoms of a deeper Arab malaise. There seemed to be a general recognition that the Arab world had fallen behind, and that it needed economic, political and religious modernization. . . .The events of the past three years have shifted their diagnosis of where the cancer is — from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in Aipac. Furthermore, the Walt and Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby has had a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network.
Yes, it's true. The main obstacles to political and economic reform in the United States are . . . American critics of current US Israel policy. Please. Any nice Jewish boy can tell you that Arab political elites were pretty damn good at deflecting attention of their own shortcomings and onto Israel long before The London Review of Books decided to publish the infamous article. The key variable here -- as Brooks has it in the previous sentence -- is not Walt and Mearsheimer, but "the events of the past three years." America suffered a serious and deadly terrorist attack that, fortunately, did not damage our nations key sources of economic or military strength and, indeed, had the consequence of strengthening our hand politically. As Brooks notes, it opened up a hopeful moment in international relations. But rather than seizing the moment, the Bush administration squandered it.
(Actually funding the DPRK -- our friends in Ethiopia)
Irrelevant?
There's good and bad in Thomas Ricks' Washington Post article on the contrast between Iraq-the-place and Iraq-the-issue but the conclusion is absurd:
Yet, with a new approach underway in Baghdad, the Washington debate is largely irrelevant to the concerns of the soldier on the ground, said the Army officer who recently returned from Baghdad. "All the talk about pullouts, votes and budgets really doesn't mean much to that 18-year-old with his body armor driving across Iraq worried about IEDs," he said, referring to roadside bombs. "For him, life consists of trying to survive for 365 days to get back home -- only to know he'll have to come back again."
Now, to be sure, most 18 year-olds don't care about congressional debates and no doubt 18 year-olds serving in a combat zone are even less inclined to become political junkies. But the Washington debate is hardly irrelevant to his concerns. He's "trying to survive for 365 days to get back home -- only to know he'll have to come back again." Whether or not he has to come back again is, however, exactly what's being debated. There's a lot of political posturing going on inside the Beltway, but it's not all posturing -- the actual policies that determine how many people go to Iraq and for how long get made here.
Happy Easter!
Or is it merry? Whichever it is, best wishes to the Christians in the audience.
Heads I Win, Tales Perpetual War
Robert Farley discovers that in wingnutland if the Mahdi Army lies low in the face of the surge, that proves the surge is working, while if the Mahdi Army decides to fight US forces, that proves the surge is working. Farley feels this is illogical. He's forgetting that the surge is Bush's policy, which means that it's working by definition and, thus, whatever reaction the Mahdi Army has to the surge is evidence of success.
Moderates Running Scared
I don't for a minute believe that Republican members representing blue states are genuinely enthusiastic about Nancy Pelosi's ascension to the Speaker's chair. I am, however, glad to see that they at least feel a need to feign enthusiasm. That means such Republicans are right where a liberal wants to see them -- frightened that 2006 wasn't as bad as it can get for them. The only real way out of Iraq before 2009 is for such fears to both deepend and spread, prompting congressional Republicans to make a serious effort to end it. I don't think the odds are good, but the signs of fear are real.
Sopranos Returns
I was super-disappointed with Season Six, or Season Six A, or whatever we're supposed to call it. And the first scene of tonight's episode -- a retcon! -- had me prepped to assume the worst. But the rest of the episode was fantastic; not as taught or striking as the show was at the very beginning, but still packing a great combination of drama and humor, a range of tones, etc. Now I'm excited for the rest of the season.
Damn Dirty Hippies
Sometimes, I think, liberals have trouble recognizing the possibility that public opinion might be on our side in a controversy. Check out, for example, the results of the Foreign Affairs / Public Agenda poll regarding the use of force against Iran:
In dealing with Iran, 44 percent prefer diplomacy to establish better relations and 28 percent favor economic sanctions. Support for military action is in the single digits and so is even threatening military action. This preference for non-military solutions cuts across party identification. Republicans are more likely to favor sanctions than improved diplomatic relations, but they still prefer non-military options (68 percent of Republicans, compared to 78 percent of Democrats).
Under the circumstances, there's absolutely no reason for Democrats to feel that it's necessary to include gratuitous threats of military action in their public comments on this subject.
What's more, as you'd expect, this isn't some idiosyncratic opinion about Iran that people have developed. Just as 9/11 and what appeared to be a surprisingly easy victory over the Taliban made a lot of people much more willing to believe in the efficacy of military solutions during the 2002-2003 period, the public has become much more generically skeptical that military action is the best way to combat nuclear proliferation:
The skepticism about the use of force applies in general terms as well. A plurality of the public, 43 percent, says attacking countries that develop weapons of mass destruction would enhance national security "not at all"—a 14-point jump in six months. Those who say it would enhance security "a great deal" dropped 19 points, to 17 percent.
All-in-all, it's a good public opinion context for this whole Pelosi-in-Damascus fight to play out in.
April 9, 2007
A Vlog Too Far
I was reading a little summary of the Sunday chat shows:
Gingrich, who is also considering a presidential candidacy, also had to address controversy over comments he made equating bilingual education with the “language of living in a ghetto.” “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace, after playing a YouTube video of Gingrich clarifying his comments in Spanish, chuckled and asked: “I have to say, it was interesting to watch. But in any case, why if you want people to speak English, do you put your own biography on your website in Spanish?”
Um . . . YouYube's great and all, but it seems to me that a large cable network should just be able to show video clips without the assistance of a hosting/streaming website, no? Meanwhile, my observation after trying to play with it for a few days is that one of the huge challenges to trying to do any kind of worthwhile user-generated video commentary is simply that very little video is available for download. Both YouTube and essentially all commercial outlets are stream-only. It's as if you were trying to run a blog in a world in which 85 percent of the text on the internet was somehow immune to copy-and-paste, but even worse than that because there's no video equivalent of retyping by hand. As in the example of Chris Wallace playing a snippet of the El Newt video and then talking about it, splicing video clips into commentary is the very essence of TV news. The technology to do it is out there, but the raw material kind of isn't unless you're prepared to make your own video capture set-up at home.
The Limits of Operational Counterterrorism
When I saw the cover of the Atlantic -- a bare lightbulb swinging on a cord and the headline "How to Break a Terrorist" -- I was afraid I might be in for another Mark Bowden "smacky-face" special. But, in a sign of how times have changed, while the subhead of Bowden's 2003 article on interrogations was "The most effective way to gather intelligence and thwart terrorism can also be a direct route into morally repugnant terrain. A survey of the landscape of persuasion," the newer story comes with a deck promising us "The inside story of how the interrogators of Task Force 145 cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle—without resorting to torture—and hunted down al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq." And, indeed, it delivers and it's a pretty fascinating story in a whodunnit kind of way. Byron York offers up a decent quibble on the torture point (noting that the successful torture-free interrogation does involve threatening to send the guy to Abu Ghraib and letting reputation make that stand in for a threat to torture him), but the interesting political point here actually concerns Bowden's own seemingly conflicting feelings about the significance of his story:
Like so much else about the Iraq War, it was a feel-good moment that amounted to little more than a bump on a road to further mayhem. Today, Iraq seems no closer to peace, unity, and a terror-free existence than it did last June. If anything, the brutal attacks on civilian targets that Zarqawi pioneered have worsened.Still, the hit was without question a clear success in an effort that has produced few. Since so much of the “war on terror” consists of hunting down men like Zarqawi, the process is instructive.
What I'd say instead is that you're seeing here the conflict between a great piece of narrative journalism -- the true story of hunting down Zarqawi -- and the desire to do an important piece of policy writing. It turns out that gathering intelligence to find Zarqawi, while an interesting process to read and write about, simply isn't something that's centrally important to the strategic mission. You wouldn't want to make a TV series about academics studying recidivism data and trying to construct a model so that sentencing policy can get maximum incapacitation bang for your prison-bed buck. Nor would an effort to draw up guidelines for reform of the parole system make for compelling drama. At the same time, the kind of thing you see in CSI, while making a better subject for episodic television, just isn't fundamentally the most important thing to a sound crime control regime.
If you want to take a serious bite out of crime, you're not going to make improved investigative techniques of that sort your primary focus. Crime is a macro-level social phenomenon that you don't solve by identifying and capturing X number of criminals. You do, of course, identify and capture criminals, but the question is always about the systemic impact of the law-enforcement apparatus on the crime situation, not "have we nailed this guy yet." Thus, Bowden's piece ends up with some of the grand irony of The Wire. We know Lieutenant Daniels and crew are smarter, better investigators than the rest of the hacks in the Baltimore Police Department, but the show also makes it clear to us that this is precisely irrelevant -- smarter, better detective work can't and won't solve Baltimore's problems any more than smarter, better operational counterterrorism will solve America's problems in Iraq.
The Truth About Cell Phones
If the rule against using cell phones on air planes has ever struck you as a bit fishy, well, you're right to be suspicious. Safety has nothing to do with it.
The Way of the Vaselines
The Vaslines have sort of been hovering on the edge of my consciousness ever since I was 12 and obsessed with Incesticide but it's only over the past few days that I've really, really focused on the question of what I think of this band, listening to The Way of the Vaselines over and over again. One striking thing, to me, is that though I'm innately suspicious of this conclusion, the first nine tracks appear to me to be uniformly superior to the final ten.
More to the point, is the fraught question of those Nirvana covers. Kurt Cobain's renditions of "Molly's Lips," "Jesus Don't Want Me for a Sunbeam," and (especially) "Son of a Gun" are all better than the originals. What's more, relative to their mates on the first half of the album, these three songs appear particularly weak. "Rory Rides Me Raw," "You Think You're a Man," "Slushy," and "Dying for It," in particular, are clearly superior to those three. One possibility is that Nirvana deliberately selected Vaselines tracks that, while good, are not their strongest work; knowing that these were flawed tunes that Nirvana was capable of improving. To my, "Dying for It" makes this especially possible since it more closely resembles a Nirvana song than do the three they actually covered. Faced with a really great track, however, Cobain chose to be influenced rather than to cover. However, another slightly more disturbing possibility occurs to me. Namely that the perceived quality gap between the covered and the non-covered songs is an illusion. Maybe I prefer the non-covered ones to the covered ones because, due to a quirk of chronology, my subjective experience clearly holds that the Nirvana versions are the originals and the Vaselines are doing covers. Perhaps a subtle -- and factually confused -- narrative of authenticity is clouding my ability to see (or, I suppose, "hear") what's really going on.
Nuclear Deal
As outlined in the MIT interdisciplinary report on "The Future of Nuclear Power" I think it's likely that the solution to climate change problem involves greater quantities of nuclear-generated electricity and very likely that the solution involves a greater proportion of energy needs being met through nuclear power. That said, John Hood's view on how this might come about seems odd:
Nuclear power seems part of what I see as an emerging Left-Right-Center "deal" on climate change. No, I haven't given into alarmism. I still think the projections of global catastrophe from human-induced warming are unwarranted based on what I've read and heard. But if you don't seen the current drift of the debate, you aren't paying close attention. The elements of the deal might be something like this: 1) continue to remove restrictions on nuclear power as a future source of household energy; 2) raise taxes on motor fuels by a significant amount, fully offset by reductions in other taxes (state sales or income taxes would be my preference, as I'd prefer state rather than federal action here), which would discourage fossil fuel use; 3) spend the tax proceeds on improving highways and bridges, thus alleviating the nation's worsening congestion (which has a cost in air quality), and funding some new research into alternative energies; and 4) change state and local land-use regulations to allow more mixed-use developments that reduce the length of work commutes and make non-auto travel at least a little more likely.
What Hood's left off here is precisely the pro-nuclear policy shift liberals would be most likely agree to. Namely, a tax not on motor fuels but on carbon emissions. If you tax gasoline but not carbon per se then there's a large risk that gasoline will be displaced by electricity as the power of choice for cars, and the electricity will be generated by coal power plants. That would be a step backwards rather than a step forward. A carbon tax, by contrast, avoids that trap. And since a carbon tax would de facto assistance to all non-coal, non-gas forms of electricity generation, it would be a substantial form of assistance to the operators of nuclear power plants. Current law, in effect, forces the nuclear power industry to internalize a far larger proportion of the environmental hazards associated with its production than the coal industry is forced to internalize. Thus, as Belle Waring writes, "If, after the implementation of a reasonable, revenue-neutral carbon tax, nuclear power would be competitive without subsidies, then I would be happy to support nuclear power."
But, like Belle, if we're going to have the government subsidize something, I think we should subsidize something truly clean like solar or wind power. Carbon taxes are, however, a form of de facto subsidy to anything that's not coal, and there's your "deal" right there. On top of that, obviously, there are a lot of technical and regulatory issues I'm not really expert to discuss, but I would recommend the MIT report if you're interested in one long, dull, earnest effort to serve as an honest broker on those issues.
Baer on Pelosi
I don't have much to say about the merits of Ken Baer's Syria-related Pelosi-bashing other than to note that the injunction to "put aside the argument over whether or not it’s good policy for us to talk with Syria" doesn't make much sense in this context. It's worth just noting the fact that a Democratic-aligned political consultant is harshly criticizing a Democratic Speaker of the House in exactly the terms which the Republican Party is currently deploying all throughout the media. One doesn't remark much upon things like this, because it actually happens quite frequently. But it's also quite remarkable. One might think consultants would live in fear of powerful Democratic Party politicians. Disagree with them from time to time, of course, or maybe even frequently. But disagree quietly, secretly; certainly not join the partisan opponents of the party's leaders in a high-profile political dispute.
And yet it happens all the time. That, in turn, tells you a lot about the relative distribution of power inside the Democratic Party. The consultants -- the important ones at least -- are more powerful than the people they nominally work for. Pelosi, obviously, isn't capable of being muscled-over by consultants the way a back-bencher who'll find his DCCC funds cut off if he doesn't hire the right people is. That said, any Democratic leader either in congress or running for a presidential nomination needs to curry favor with the consultant class lest the media landscape be filled with "Democratic strategists," anonymous or (as in this case) not, slamming them. The consultants, meanwhile, seem to have little fear of speaking out. And fearlessness is, of course, an admirable quality in a journalist or a blogger. It's not, however, really what one would expect from a political consultant -- they're supposed to be hack partisans.
Alive in Baghdad
If you're interested in something a little more worthwile than a Matt Yglesias vlog, you should check out Alive in Baghdad, an ongoing independent internet video production done with fairly professional production values by a team based both in the United States and in Iraq. Their latest episode, embedded here, is an interview with a man aliased "Mohammed" who tells his story of torture at the hands of one of Iraq's many armed factions.
I watched five or six episodes of the series last night in quick succession after discovered it and was sufficiently impressed to PayPal a donation their way. Check them out and see what they think. This is the sort of journalism nobody does on television anymore. A lot of older journalists of my acquaintance think the ultimate impact of the Web will be to drive it out of the print world, too. I'm more of an optimist -- believing that dramatically lowered costs of production and distribution will, as seen in Alive in Baghdad, help spark a rennaissance providing those of us who are interested with unparalleled access to information.
Cry "Munich!" And Let Slip the Dogs of Punditry
Via Andrew Sullivan, Francis Fukuyama's take on the pundit's jihad against Tony Blair's successful resolution of the captive British soliders situation: "when has Krauthammer ever not cried 'Munich!' in response to an act of diplomacy?"
Indeed. Here's a small sample of Krauthammer seeing Hitlers everywhere.
Two Foreign Policies! I Shudder...
Obviously, 98 percent of the things being said about Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria are 98 percent disingenuous, but I have got some sense that some number of people have some level of genuine concern that it's bad for congress to be seen as having an "independent foreign policy" from the one the president is running. This is, I think, a mistake about the nature of the American system of government. I heartily agree that American-style separation of powers between the legislature and the executive is a bad idea and would gladly support a constitutional convention to provide us with a parliamentary form of government. That said, we have the government we have. The president gets fixed four-year terms independent of the congress, and the congress has authority distinct from the president's. Nancy Pelosi needs to discharge the duties of her office as they exist in the actual constitution.
Those duties give congress a gigantic role to play in foreign affairs. Congress, for example, sets the Pentagon's budget. And, of course, the Foreign Operations budget. Think we should help Indonesia set up a high-quality secular education system? Combat AIDS in Africa? Build a missile defense system? Waste less money on the Virginia Class submarine? Make aid to Pakistan conditional on moves toward democracy? Make a free trade agreement with South Korea? Secure authorization to maintain a gigantic military presence in Iraq? You need . . . congressional votes to do any of those things. And, obviously, those things are the very blood and guts of foreign policy. The president and the diplomats who work for him can negotiate anything they like, but nothing happens unless they can get congress to agree to it. These powers -- the power to pass laws, appropriate funds, ratify treaties, etc. -- aren't esoteric elements of congressional authority, they're the very essence of congressional authority.
Insofar as congress disagrees with the president about the desirability of foreign aid programs, military expenditures, treaties, trade pacts, etc. those things don't happen. Thus, the views of congressional leaders are of direct and immediate concern to foreignern leaders. Which is why foreign leaders are willing to talk to congressional leaders. There's no special rule about foreign policy that says it's somehow unfair for congress to get involved. It's true that this makes US policy less coherent than it might be, but coherence in that sense isn't one of the features of American political institutions. The Social Security Administration is, for example, currently run by an executive branch that thinks Social Security should be done away with. The program continues to exist because congress disagrees. And somehow the country goes on, day after day, without everyone needing to cry into their Washington Posts over breakfast.
What Do Iraqis Think?
George Packer in an interesting reader dialogue about his article on Iraqi collaborators with the US and how the US government is screwing them over, writes:
You have expressed Iraqi opinions in your own words. The ones I talk to—and, for various reasons, it’s an extremely limited pool—want America to leave. They also want to live normal lives, and they don’t see that happening with an American departure. Everyone I met on my last trip feared a wider catastrophe without American troops. They aren’t particularly concerned with the terms of the debate in Washington—time lines, benchmarks, departure dates, troop numbers. They would like security and order, however possible. They have little faith that the U.S. can achieve it, but even less that their own government and security forces can.
I was pondering this on the arc trainer while wondering if society really needs ESPN News segments specifically about fantasy baseball (duller than the real thing!) and the thing is that the set of Iraqis Packer talks to is likely to be not just "an extremely limited pool" but a wildly unrepresentative one. I'm guessing that Iraqis inclined to talk to American reporters at this point are incredibly inclined to believe that their lives will improve in the short run if US troops are withdrawn. Iraqis who think that are probably wrong, but I could imagine people believing it (people believe lots of stuff). Indeed, the most recent comprehensive polling of Iraq that I'm aware of indicates just that.
Now I know that statistically valid surveys are no substitute for anectodal evidence but the clear and consistent evidence that Iraq's citizens want us to leave and don't share doomsday views about the consequences of an American departure plays shockingly little role in the public debate.
Kirkpatrick: Iraq a Mistake
David Corn unearths the interesting factoid the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick said Iraq was a mistake in a book that will be published posthumously:
She had just completed a book entitled Making War To Keep Peace, which is being published next month. In the book, she reports--apparently for the first time--that she had "grave reservations" about George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. She notes that at the time, "I was privately critical of the Bush administration's argument for the use of military force for preemptive self-defense." She does not say where and to whom she voiced her misgivings--if she did. Most strikingly, she argues that the war--with respect to bringing democracy to Iraqis--did more harm than good.
Of course, as Corn goes on to note, she didn't, say, do anything that might possibly have impacted the course of events.
April 10, 2007
Racism in the Morning
I really liked Eugene Robinson's colum on the Imus affair. I'm a bit surprised the Post headlined it "Misogyny in the Morning," however, since what he's clearly trying to say is that Imus is a racist. As in "The simple answer would be -- all together now -- racism." And as in Robinson's discussion of Imus' deployment of the admittedly misognynistic term "ho"
It's easy to surmise that Imus came out with the word "ho" because hip-hop is an African American art form and he associated the word with black women. He knew nothing about those women from Rutgers, except that they were black. It's hard to imagine him describing, say, a Swedish basketball team as a bunch of "stringy-haired hos."
Right. I dunno. I always used to listen to Imus when I was a kid. His show is the sort of thing that's hilarious if you're in the crucial 11-16 demographic.
Why Not Both?
Tim Lee writes: "The long-term threat to the music industry is not pirates, but musicians themselves. Many of them would rather be famous than wealthy, and will give their music away if that's what it takes to get it widely heard. As dirt-cheap, Internet based methods for getting music to fans continue to improve, labels will have less and less to offer such bands." This is almost certainly true, but it's also worth pointing out that being famous can, itself, be reasonably lucrative. I started this blog on precisely the terms Tim Lee suggests -- I had some notions, I had means of placing said notions on the internet, and I figured I'd consider myself lucky if I could get anyone to pay attention.
It was a hobby. But, of course, as things turned out I was able to get people to pay attention. But, of course, having a website that all these people read on a daily basis and that a wider family of people read at least sometimes has proven to be a valuable commodity in its own right. I've never charged anyone a dime to read the blog, and can't imagine circumstances under which I ever would, but that doesn't mean "giving it away" is necessary a terrible economic strategy.
Accept no Substitutes
When it comes to the High Broderism, nobody gets the job done like the man himself. Today's column takes the view that even though Democrats are right about Iraq and Bush is wrong, in light of Bush's stubborn intransigence, the Democrats should basically give in to Bush's demands, in exchange for which Bush will continue to implement Bush's war policy absent formal fetters but will suddenly start doing so in the manner of a mature, serious person rather than, say, George W. Bush. That the premise of the compromise was Bush's supreme stubborness and that this makes a sudden conversion to reasonableness unlikely seems lost on Broder.
The Ross Plan
This is really much more Dennis Ross' field than mine, so I'd be interested to hear what others have to say about it, but I think the Israel-Palestine agenda he outlined in a column yesterday is a little insane. Check it out:
Kirkpatrick Again
Brian Beutler notes the late former UN Ambassador's seemingly long record of public support for the war she more recently claims to have opposed. I actually find her account fairly plausible. If you look at her statements, she's clearly trying to be helpful to the pro-war cause, but isn't actually saying "and therefore, we should invade Iraq."
In short, it's just another tale of corruption and weakness in the foreign policy establishment. Like a lot of Democratic Party-affiliated people, Kirkpatrick may well have thought invading Iraq seemed like a bad idea but decided it made more sense to prove that she can be a good vassals to her political and financial patrons. Since the party line Kirkpatrick was supposed to toe was a pro-war one, she toed it. Democrats in her position tended to simply say nothing.
French Health Care Is Awesome
Jonathan Cohn makes the case. The one thing I would say is that it seems weird to me to ignore distributive issues when writing about this issue, especially from the pro side of the universal health care debate. Given that the United States is substantially richer than France and has a substantially less egalitarian distribution of wealth and income than does France, it would be shocking to me if you couldn't find some Americans who have better health care than do most French people.
Here's an Idea...
I missed this story when it ran, but it seems that a couple of days ago Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer took a trip to Somalia to try to urge the creation of a truce in Mogadishu. Does this count as a concession that the "let's help the Ethiopians invade and install a new government!" policy of December didn't exactly work out? After all, there was a truce in Mogadishu in place before this all started up. How this plays into the mind-boggling decision to undermine the sanctions regime against North Korea that we insisted the UN adopt, I couldn't quite say.
To make a long story short, nobody cared when it happened and I don't expect anyone to care now (note how the rightwing cheerleaders for the Ethiopians' swift victory seem to have completely lost interest in the subject), but I really wish we hadn't gone down this road.
UPDATE: See this report from Human Rights Watch: "Fighting between Ethiopian armed forces and insurgent groups in Mogadishu escalated between March 29 and April 2 and resulted in deaths and injuries to hundreds of civilians, including from indiscriminate shelling and mortar attacks on heavily populated areas."
Civility
Eric Alterman has a great column up about "The Politics of Pundit Prestige." The lede is worth the price of admission:
Back in the pre-Internet days of yore, political punditry was the best job in journalism and one of the best anywhere. You could spout off on anything you wanted, and almost nobody would call you on it, much less find a place to publish and prove you wrong. And once you had established yourself as "credible," it required little work, save coming up with a few semi-memorable phrases. (George Will's chef-d'oeuvre was opining that the Reagan Administration "loved commerce more than it loathed Communism.") With the advent of television talk shows, riches arrived in the form of corporate speaking gigs that paid tens of thousands of dollars an hour just to say the same damn thing you said on television. When Fred Barnes famously pronounced on The McLaughlin Group, "I can speak to almost anything with a lot of authority," he was right, at least to the degree that he was really saying, "I can speak to almost anything without anyone pointing out how full of shit I usually am."
This, I think, is what a lot of the obsession with blogosphere "incivility" is all about. A lot of people in the media do things that bloggers generally can't do. File dispatches from dangerous foreign lands. Investigate serious wrongdoing inside the government. That kind of thing. But lots of people in the media do things that are essentially the same as what bloggers do. Offer commentary on things they read about in the newspaper. Summarize what they think the most salient elements of a high-profile speech were. Point out some noteworthy portions of a press conference. Journalists don't like the competition, don't like the criticism, don't like the threat to their economic model, etc., etc., etc. So there's a tendency to seize on semi-arbitrary things that distinguish blog posts from op-ed columns. We don't write "fuck" or call people "wankers," we don't say mean things about other journalists, we're civil, and so forth.
What's the Joke?
I finally got a chance to read Gwen Ifill's justly praised op-ed on the Don Imus matter:
For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.
This is a good point. The scare-quotes are essential. What was the joke here? One can imagine such a thing as a racist joke. There's an anti-semitic joke I like that goes "what's the difference between a Jew and a canoe?" Answer: "A canoe tips." That's a joke, albeit an anti-Jewish one. "Nappy-headed hos" isn't, as far as I can tell, an actual joke any more than "George Soros is a rich, greedy kike" is a joke (get it?). It's just a racist insult.
The Perils of Aggregates
Via Ann Friedman, Anita Hamilton in Time seeks to debunk guilt-based financial advice for women that, in Ann's words, "tut-tuts women for blowing their retirement savings on a beauty binge at Sephora." The debunking:
Women do spend $1,069--$246 more than men do--on clothing every year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2004-2005 Consumer Expenditure Survey. But that's chump change compared with what single men spend on car ownership ($846 more than single women), eating out ($752 more), alcoholic drinks ($280 more) and audiovisual gear ($143 more). Cutting back on needless spending isn't a bad idea for anyone, but "renegotiating your credit-card balances or getting a lower cost on your IRA probably saves you a lot more money," says Christian Weller, an economist at the Center for American Progress. "That's much more prudent advice to women than saying 'Don't go buying all those Prada shoes.'"
Fair enough, but I think efforts to analyze this question with those kind of statistics run a bit aground once we put the small matter of class into the picture. One factor holding down single women's expenditures on booze and car ownership is that many, many more single women than single men are primary caregivers for their children. Yet, while single motherhood is a fairly widespread phenomenon in America it's pretty rare among the sort of high-SES women to whom I assume these books are addressed. To really tease out whether or not it's true that the sort of women the advice is addressed to spend more money "frivolously" than do men who are similarly situated would be a difficult statistical task and would, among other things, require a fairly rigorous definition of what sort of women it is we're talking about.
Be all that as it may, the correct thing to look at isn't absolute dollar expenditures, but savings as a proportion of income. That, at least, could tell you whether or not it's actually true that men are more frugal than women. I really think someone should do that study, since whichever way it turns out it can easily be spun into the sort of gender-norm re-enforcing narrative the media craves. For example, women save more than men because they're more cautious, having evolved to keep children safe while men have evolved to embrace risk and kill large animals. Alternatively, women spend more because they're more frivolous, having evolved to maximize resource-investment when young on attracting a mate who is expected to provide for them down the road.
April 11, 2007
Furman Health Care Plan
Jason Furman says there's something to the right's Health Savings Account theory of health care reform -- if you make patients sensitive to the costs of health care, you can save a lot of money with no discernable impact on health outcomes. But, he says, HSAs with their flat, high deductible create a very bad situation for people of modest means. And, indeed, the evidence that such cost sharing need not lead to averse health outcomes wasn't actually from a study of HSA-type programs. Rather, Furman thinks that patients should need to cover 50 percent of their health care costs up to a fixed proportion of income, in particular he "would require typical families to pay half of their health costs until they reached 7.5 percent of their income; low-income families would not have any cost sharing." This would encourage the most downscale Americans to consume somewhat more health care at the low end, while providing cost control measures for more prosperous Americans in a manner that still leaves care deemed necessary clealry affordable.
It seems clever to me. Via Brad DeLong, here's a writeup. The long PDF version is here (PDF) which reveals a lot of ins-and-outs. In the most liberal version of the proposal, what you have is a single-payer insurance program with the insurance program designed with the cost-sharing provisions Furman outlines. Such a program might also offer certain things for free, namely "health treatments whose benefits are proven but currently underutilized, such as preventive care, statins for people with high cholesterol, or beta blockers to manage cardiac arrhythmiasover." There are, however, a wide range of other kinds of scenarios consistent with Furman's main point which, somewhat oddly, ends up leaving him agnostic about the basic questions about the nature of the health care system.
I'll look forward to seeing the comment of others more learned than I in such matters.
Presto-Changeo
Now this here is journalism. Ian Urbina of The New York Times obtained an original copy of a report indicating that "a federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation." This conclusion was, of course, trouble for the official GOP talking points. Hence, the solution: "Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate."
It's really scandals on top of scandals on top of lies with this whole song and dance. Everyone knows that Republicans are good at identifying certain kinds of procedures that tend to depress turnout among pro-Democratic demographic groups. Fraud is the rationale for the procedures, even though nobody ever finds any evidence that it's a serious problem. So one needs to gun up a lot of mumbo-jumbo in order to be able to deploy the fraud argument as a smokescreen for vote suprression. Increasingly these days, the GOP is getting caught red handed doing it.
IP For Thee but Not For Me
As the US lodges a complaint to the WTO that the People's Republic of China is being insufficiently zealous about cracking down on "pirate" DVDs, The Atlantic posts a neat feature recapitulating some of the debate in their pages about copyright law in the second half of the nineteenth century. You'll learn that in its early decades, the United States -- like any responsible developing nation -- has very lax enforcement of intellectual property rights. As the country developed, calls for us to adopt stricter standards even at the price of having less "pirated" European material eventually became impossible to resist since the US came to produce a sufficiently influential sector of IP producers.
One can go in a few directions from here, but the simplest point is that this sort of trade conditionality is relatively uncontroversial in the United States. It's written right into the text of most of the agreements. Not "we will lower our barriers to the importation of your goods" or even "we will lower our barriers to the importation of your goods in exchange for you doing the same." Rather, it's "we will lower our barriers to the importation of your goods if you adopt an intellectual property regime we like better." This is not very structurally different from a more labor-friends sort of conditionality where instead one says "we will lower our barriers to the importation of your goods if you adopt labor rights regime we like better." On the other hand, as you see, IP conditionality hasn't been enormously successful at actually achieving its enforcement aims in a lot of fields, though it has worked out nicely for pharmaceutical firms.
Goldberg Variations
Jonah Goldberg tries to deploy a couple of hand-wavy references to "culture" along with an argument from authority citing Seymour Martin Lipset to explain why the French health care system, despite its seeming superiority to the American, won't work in the USA. Conveniently, the culture explanation lets Goldberg run the argument without saying (or, indeed, knowing) anything about health care policy in France or the United States. Henry Farrell smells a rat. Goldberg, gets upset.
John Holbo retorts that Goldberg is now deploying "the two-step of terrific triviality." How does this work? "Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face." Exactly. I don't think enough attention has been paid yet to the way Goldberg is misunderstanding the Lipset argument he's invoking.
War Czar
It looks like nobody wants the job of overseeing Bush's war. That is, I think, the smart play. You're just being set up for failure. The Bush family's one-way understanding of loyalty also has to make this a relatively unappealing post.
Bill Richardson
Here I was wondering the other day which of our fine Democratic presidential candidates who say they want to end the war in Iraq would propose actually withdrawing our troops from Iraq, clearly promising to avoid the sort of "withdrawal" favored by many Democrats in which tens of thousands of American soldiers are still in the war zone, presumably fighting the war. The answer is New Mexico governor and seasoned foreign policy hand Bill Richardson. Incidentally, I'll be in New Mexico in a couple of weeks. Santa Fe recommendations?
The Collapse
TAP Online column takes a look at the GOP's inability to recognize the electoral fiasco staring them in the face. Via Dan Drezner, an article about Brigham Young students protesting a planned Dick Cheney appearance on campus:
“The problem is this is a morally dubious man,” said Andrew Christensen, a 22-year-old Republican from Salt Lake City. “It’s challenging the morality and integrity of this institution.”
Well said. Meanwhile, via Mark Kleiman, pessimism about 2008:
My level of concern and dismay is very, very high,” said Mickey Edwards, a Republican former congressman from Oklahoma who is now a lecturer in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “It’s not that I have any particular problem with the people who are running for the Republican nomination. I just don’t know how they can run hard enough or fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of the Bush administration.”
The striking thing is that they aren't even trying to escape. I mean, sure, Rudy Giuliani will escape Bush's opposition to taxpayer financed abortions, but on the key things that have made the Bush administration such an incredible failure, all the contenders are marching off the cliff in lockstep.
The City Veins
My friend Charles' band, The City Veins, have their first show tonight at Velvet Lounge circa 9PM. Be there. You can even download the whole album for free by clicking here.
Political Shocker!
The Politico has a pretty stunning scoop. It appears that members of the House Progressive Caucus wish Nancy Pelosi would spend more time addressing their concerns, and less time addressing the concerns of Blue Dogs. What else are they supposed to think? I'm looking forward to next week's followup on how Blue Dogs appreciate some of Pelosi's outreach, but wish she would cater to them more. Factional groups exist to complain that the leadership isn't paying enough attention to them; that's their whole purpose.
Pentagon Vlogging
It turns out that the Department of Defense, under the Pentagonchannel.mil rubric does vlogs. Or at least webcasting. Including this semi-hilarious daily news broadcast called "Around the Services." For some reason, they decided that the job of anchoring this show couldn't be done by a civilian contractor and she does it wearing a uniform.
It turns out to be pretty interesting. The report on the Air Force dudes in Afghanistan was neat, I'm always glad to learn more about the military's increasing investment in the Horn of Africa, etc. It all serves as a reminder of how much conventional television has cut back on lengthier reported stories. It's also interesting how much more effective it is to get some competent people together and have them report some good news instead of having a bunch of know-nothings hectoring everyone "why don't you report the good news?!?! Why don't you report the good news?!?!?"
What More Can I Say?
I don't really see the comparison between Don Imus talking about "nappy headed hos" and hip-hop artists rapping about "bitches" and "hos". I don't see US Senators and major political journalists doing guest appearances on rap albums and praising misogynistic rappers as praiseworthy sources of information on weighty topics. Indeed, quite the reverse. Politicians generally enjoy hanging out with celebrities (enjoy it a bit too much for their own good) with shy away from rappers for precisely this reason.
There are also speaker/author distinction issues in play, but that maybe gets things too complicated. As for Imus, I wouldn't cry if he got sacked, but I don't think that's absolutely vital either. It's his status as a media and political power-broker and member of the "respectable" establishment that's totally bizarre here. There's a lot of offensive material slushing about in the media environment, but little of it is so explicitly ratified by these kind of people.
Panda-blogging
I do love the National Zoo, but perhaps I should pay a visit to Sichuan province. Pandas turn out to be even cuter when they're more plentiful.
Yglesias Smack Down: Politicians Love Hip-Hop
Jason Zengerle seems to have the goods:
Obama meet with Ludacris (maybe they compared Grammys); and Hillary Clinton tap Timbaland (not a rapper, per se, but a producer of many rappers) to host a big fundraiser. And don't forget John Edwards doing yoga with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons last summer. That's three examples. It's a bona fide trend!Well; I find that surprising, but it all checks out.
Edwards Statement on Iraq
John Edwards' statement on what he thinks withdrawal entails seems eminently reasonable to me:
When we say complete withdrawal we mean it. No more war. No combat troops in the country. Period. But we're also being honest. If John Edwards is president, we're not going to leave the American Embassy in Iraq as the only undefended embassy in the world, for example. There will be Marine guards there, just like there are at our embassies in London , Riyadh , and Tokyo . And just the same, if American civilians are providing humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people, we're going to protect them. How in good conscience could we refuse to protect them and then allow humanitarian workers to be at risk for their lives or the work not to happen at all? Finally, it's also Senator Edwards' position that we will have troops in the region to prevent the sectarian violence in Iraq from spilling over into other countries, for counter-terrorism, or to prevent a genocide. But in the region means in the region - for example, existing bases like Kuwait , naval presence in the Persian Gulf , and so forth. I hope this helps explain Senator Edwards' position.
There is, I note, a certain intrinsic fuzziness here. If you think, as Edwards and I do, that it's a good idea for there to be forces in the region capable of responding to contingencies, then there's still a question of how you respond to actual contingencies. What one needs, at the end of the day, is a president who'll bring in a good team and demonstrate good judgment, not a president who'll make good campaign promises. Better good campaign promises than bad ones, of course, but there's a limited value to these things. On Iraq, though, we now have a pretty solid picture of where Clinton, on the one hand, and Edwards and Richardson, on the other hand, stand. The pressure's on Obama to get off the fence.
April 12, 2007
The Fraud Fraud
Try as the GOP might, there's still no evidence of a meaningful voter fraud problem in the United States, notes another great Ian Urbina article in The New York Times, this time co-written with Eric Lipton. Worse, in a lot of ways, is that since the Bush administration took power the Republicans have shifted from merely using fake election fraud as a rationale for trying to make it hard for people to vote, to actually organizing prosecutions so as to create the appearance that their rhetoric is substantiated. As a result, you have dozens of people actually getting arrested and charged for what were pretty clearly innocent mistakes.
New Named Polls
- Giuliani 48, Clinton 42
- McCain 42, Clinton 45
- Romney 37, Clinton 44
- Giuliani 42, Obama 46
- McCain 40, Obama 48
- Romney 31, Obama 50
- Giuliani 45, Edwards 44
- McCain 40, Edwards 44
- Romney 30, Edwards 50