I hadn't heard this story about MIT firing its Dean of Admissions not for any shortcomings in her job performance but for having lied 28 years ago and said she had a college degree when she first applied for a low-level position at MIT. I think Kevin Carey says most of what needs to be said about the irrationality of this and the broader social and cultural obsession with the potentially meaningless bachelor's degree.
There's this current well-intentioned mania for producing policies that will get more people to go to college, and to some extent to get more people to graduate from college, but it's clear that the first step in anything along these lines is that we need to know something about why a college degree is valuable. Insofar as it's a pure screening mechanism (and there's considerable evidence that this is at least what it mostly is) then expanding access to college is only going to devalue the credential. Presumably there are some actually useful skills being imparted to some college students (my appreciation of the flaws of semantic internalism has, for example, much application to my role as a professional political pundit who must occassionally offer views about "originalism" as an approach to jurisprudence -- and, yes, this is irony in case any Atlantic readers out there aren't used to it) but it's really crucial that we figure out what these are and find ways to spread the skills themselves rather than the credential. Meanwhile, the habit of disqualifying perfectly competent people from jobs based on a lack of degrees has become yet another brick in the American wall of inegalitarianism.
ESPN's Daily Dime proclaim's Allen Iverson's Saturday performance the day's worst:
Was Iverson bad? Not exactly. Was he good enough? No way. His 7-for-20 shooting (0-for-3 on 3s) was not what Denver needed in such a big game.
Here's a question: Why does Iverson ever have games where he puts up three treys? The guy is an okay three point shooter -- he sinks the NBA three 31 percent of the time, which is a heck of a lot better than most people can do -- but though this is close, it's distinctly below the break even point. Score three points on 31 percent of your possessions and you'll rack up an offensive efficiency of 93 points per hundred possessions -- terrible. Teams can easily afford to give him that shot all day. This is, I think, the sort of thing where looking at the numbers really does matter. Watching games, the difference between a 31 percent three point shooter and a 37 percent three point shooter isn't going to be obvious. Over the long run, though, the 31 percent shooter is probably hurting his team while the 37 percent shooter is almost certainly helping. By eyeball, though, these are both guys who hit about one shot in three.
Bad news for folks who thought the appointment of David Petraeus to command in Iraq was going to single-handedly undo centuries worth of the American way of war -- we're back to launching artillery barrages against neighborhoods in southern Iraq. Read the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (PDF) that Petraeus wrote if you want to know why that's a bad idea. Or read Jeffrey Record on how it is the US never seems to get this right no matter how many times we resolve to do things differently.
What, you may be wondering, is the deal with the requirement that comments be held for approval before they're published? The deal, in short, is that it's a mistake and it'll be fixed soon. This is one of the reasons why we've been playing around with the site a bit this weekend before the "official" launch tomorrow.
Incidentally, as I'm sure you can tell from the nav bar, The Atlantic is offering other fine blog products besides this one. In particular, James Fallows and Ross Douthat are doing Atlantic blogs and, of course, Andrew Sullivan's been blogging away here for a while. Clearly I would say this, but I think it's a pretty stellar cast of blog colleagues I've got here.
For some reason, Freemasons seem to be big in New Mexico. Big and powerful. This temple, for example, is right by the only place we could find parking near Santa Fe Plaza the other day, and the lot turns out to be under Masonic control. And, of course, the main thing I've learned on my trip is that outside of my cozy Northeastern home, if you control the parking, you control the world.
Meanwhile, in Taos we went to the Kit Carson Home where it was revealed that Carson, the "legendary" mountain man neither of us had heard of, had been a Mason, as were most of the important figures in 19th Century Taos. Not only that, but the tour guide darkly hinted that the home/museum complex was still under the thumb of the Masons and that the Masons actually had the power to blot a person's name out of history. Which is all fine as far as it goes, but it raises the question of who's really behind Bill Richardson's presidential campaign -- does he serve the American people, or the vast Masonic conspiracy? Think about it.
A colleague sends this LA Times article suggesting it as "perfect for New Mexico blogging." And, indeed, it is. The subject is New Mexico's chile industry, which has been in trouble lately because "since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the state's chile crop has plunged almost 50% as cheaper foreign imports from Mexico, Peru and China pushed local growers out of the market." As a result much former cropland is being sold for the developers who bring you the southwest's impressive sprawl. To the rescue, of course, come education and technology so chile scientists working at New Mexico State University are looking to preserve the state's chile competitiveness by developing superior peppers.
I managed to see the end of Chicago's game four win over Miami before boarding my plane in Albuquerque. Now I'm actually on a layover in Midway Airport still savoring the loathesome Heat's defeat. This probably just ends up with the Bulls losing to the Pistons in Round 2, but Chicago's a young team with a bright future, so good for them. But more to the point, bad for Miami, which isn't going to be getting any younger.
An intriguing signpost in the history of blogospheric development as Chris Bowers analogizes the netroots to the Fluxus movement in art and means it in a good way.
I think I agree with just about all the substance of David Brooks' concern trolling about the GOP (see, e.g., my final American Prospect column which made some similar points), but this minor aside strikes me as wrongheaded in an interesting way:
Second, there is the corrupting influence of teamism. Being a good conservative now means sticking together with other conservatives, not thinking new and adventurous thoughts. Those who stray from the reservation are accused of selling out to the mainstream media by the guardians of conservative correctness.
I think there's perhaps some infelicitous phrasing in Brooks' apparent contention that the true soul of conservatism lies in the thinking of "new and adventurous thoughts" (this doesn't sound all that conservative) but one knows what he means. The conservative punditocratic establishment doesn't reward independent thinking or clever new notions. Instead, it tends to reward team play and a somewhat abstruse and scholastic in-house quibbling rather than deep thinking about policy. That said, why shouldn't "being a good conservative" mean "sticking together with other conservatives?" It seems to me that that's exactly what it ought to mean. Insofar as someone -- David Brooks, say -- reaches conclusions at odds with an emphasis on sticking together with other conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism, but it's still the case that to be a good conservative means to stick with the conservatives.
Anne Kornblut offers up a profile of Mark Penn for The Washington Post that everyone ought to read. To make a long story short, though, if you think the problem with the Democratic Party is that it's insufficiently inclined to support wars, you'll like Mark Penn. If you think the Party is insufficiently friendly to the interests of major corporations and wealthy individuals, you'll like Mark Penn. If you think Menachim Begin was a great man and that the world needs more Dick Morris acolytes, you'll like Mark Penn. And if you like Mark Penn, you'll love Hillary Clinton since he "controls the main elements of her campaign . . . has consolidated his power, according to advisers close to the campaign, taking increasing control of the operation . . . has become involved in virtually every move Clinton makes, with the result that the campaign reflects the chief strategist as much as the candidate."
The one thing I'd really have to quibble with is the notion that Penn has "undisputed brilliance." I would dispute the idea that he's brilliant and I'm fairly sure I'm not alone. He's a clever businessman who's made a good deal of money for himself, but so have lots of other consultants. The view that the correct general election strategy on every issue is for the Democratic candidate to move to the right doesn't seem like really innovative thinking to me.
Walking home from the Metro today I saw a $5 on the sidewalk. How funny, I thought to myself as I walked past the bill, isn't there some saying in economics about how you never see a $5 on the sidewalk? Then greater wisdom cut through the travel-induced fatigue and I remembered to pick up the money.
Michael Winerip provides a plethora of anecdotal evidence for the conclusion that it's becoming much more difficult to get into an elite college. Roughly speaking, he interviews Harvard applicants, they seem much more qualified to him than he was when he successfully applied back in the day, and none of them ever get in. And, of course, these scare stories are based on data. Everybody knows that "several Ivies, including Harvard, rejected a record number of applicants this year." The trick, as Kevin Carey has helpfully pointed out is that this isn't really true. For every applicant, there are some number of applications and the number of applications-per-student has been growing rapidly:
When the number of applications grows faster than the number of applicants, it creates a false sense that admission standards are getting tighter. Imagine 20 students, each of whom applies to five schools and gets into two. Now imagine if the same students each applied to ten schools and got into two. The outcome for the students is the same: two acceptance letters. But the schools report lower admission rates, and the odds of admission seem worse.
In particular, Carey notes that the number of acceptances at the Ivy League increased 10.6 percent between 2002-2006, which was faster than the rate of increase in the number of high school graduates. It was, however, slower than the 28.6 percent rate of increase in the number of college applications. And it's easy to see why students are mailing off more applications -- compared to other things prosperous families do to help their kids get an edge in the admissions process, just mailing more applications is simple and relatively cheap. From a social point of view, however, an escalating arms race in which everyone is applying to dozens of colleges won't be a very happy end point.
One of the odder things I saw in New Mexico was this colony of "earthships", houses built out of garbage and packed dirt, powered by their own solar and wind units, and featuring self-contained systems to capture and recycle rainwater. Operating without air conditioners or heating units, the buildings are designed to maintain stable temperatures thanks to design features. The point, of course, is to be environmentally friendly.
I wonder if some of my more eco-aware readers might be able to weigh in on the validity of this. Based on the movie, I have a few doubts. Mostly, they seem to be completely ignoring the environmental impact of living in such a sprawling fashion. A low-density compound of people living 15 miles outside of Taos, New Mexico is either going to result in a ton of driving, or else is going to be curbing its environmental footprint primarily through its residents never going anywhere or buying anything. This is fine, perhaps, when you're talking about people with total commitment to the cause, but it's not really pointing in the direction of a systemic solution. My understanding is that it's much better to encourage people to live in relatively small apartments where they can walk to the grocery store and take mass transit to work than it is to get everyone to stick solar panels on the roofs of big exurban houses. But perhaps I'm wrong?
It's hard for me to imagine anything more wrongheaded than Michael Rubin's on-again, off-again crusade against the Islamist AKP Party in Turkey. Obviously, not being a Muslim of any sort I have a hard time imagining myself backing an Islamist political party and would expect Rubin to feel the same way. But as a third-party observer of the Muslim world, it seems to me that things like the AKP are exactly what we should be hoping to see -- political mobilizations based around the appeal of Islam that nonetheless abide by democratic norms and don't see Islamist politics as entailing violent confrontations with the West. If America takes the attitude that only rigid, Attaturk-style secularism is an acceptable form of political organization, then this is precisely the sort of thing that drives the view that the United States is engaging in the global persecution of Muslims and Islam. Rubin, however, is having none of it:
What is most amazing is that the State Department has downplayed Turks' concern about the Islamist agenda. If there was any truth to Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried comparison of the AKP to a European Christian Democratic Party, Turks would not be rallying for democracy and secularism. Perhaps it is time for some introspection in Foggy Bottom and at the U.S. embassy in Ankara.
Rubin's right that the comparison to a contemporary Christian Democratic Party doesn't hold all that much water. Ironically, the correct comparison is to the Republican Party in the United States. This is a political party that draws much of its support from the political mobilization of Christian sentiment. The policies and rhetoric it employs to tap into Christian political mobilization are deeply controversial, are capable of prompting mass protests by more secular-minded people, and -- yes -- wind up with the party backing somewhat illiberal policies on various scores. All that said, the GOP is still obviously a participant in a democratic system of elections and governance. Dennis Hastert surrendered the Speaker's chair to Nancy Pelosi. And while the Republicans' deep ties to Christian political have tended to drive non-Christian voters in droves to the Democrats, the GOP does get some support from members of religious minority groups like Rubin himself.
Michael Cooper's New York Times article on how John McCain is trying to "recapture" the "vigor" of his last campaign nicely encapsulates the congenital unwillingness of the political press to cover issues. I'm not nearly so naive as to think that issues and public opinion of the issues is determinative in electoral politics, but in the case of McCain's waxing and waning fortunes, that's clearly what's happening. Back in 2000, McCain's ultra-hawkish national security views were low-salience and moderately popular, and the process issues on which he has a lot of appeal to moderates were high-salience.
Today, the relative salience of these issues has flipped and McCain's national security views have become very unpopular among moderates and independents. Meanwhile, McCain was never well-liked by the conservative base. The "vigor" of his previous campaign derived from the fact that his political profile at the time was popular with many independents and moderate Republicans, not primarily the reverse.
Rich Lowry quotes some of George Tenet's book and argues that the Iraq debate "was always fundamentally about how much risk we were willing to tolerate in a post-9/11 environment." Or, as Tenet says, Iraq "was never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise." Two points in response. One is that while this was, indeed, one of the debates taking place within elite circles that has almost no resemblance to the public debate playing out in the media which was a demagogic scare campaign designed to convince people that the country faced an imminent threat from Iraq.
The other is that it's staggering how wrongheaded that Tenet/Lowry framing of the issue was. The underlying presumption was that achieving the goals of the campaign -- replacing Saddam's regime with a stable one congenial to American interests -- would be basically unproblematic. Perhaps somewhat costly in terms of money or achieving secondary diplomatic objectives, but basically something we could achieve if we just decided to. To not invade was to tolerate a certain level of risk, whereas to invade was to proclaim the risk intolerable. Off the Lowry/Tenet tables was the basic reality that the downside risks involved in engaging in preventive war are actually enormous.
I'm confused. James Capretta argues in The Weekly Standard that Social Security benefits discourage large families and that, therefore, we must cut Social Security benefits in order to increase the birth rate in order to . . . make it easier to pay for Social Security benefits.
There's some truth to this argument, but on another level I think it pretty obviously doesn't make sense. One needs to first decide whether or not one believes there should be a generous defined benefit public sector pension program and then think about child rearing issues in light of that. All that follows from this is that there needs to be some level of balance between public sector support for retirees and public sector support for kids and their parents. The conservative solution is to level down, by reducing benefits for retirees and the progressive solution is to level up with better education, day care, work-family policy, etc. The conservative way, people need to have more kids to support them in their old age, and women will need to stay at home to care for these larger broods in a world without high-quality preschool options. The liberal way, better preschool and children's health care benefits slightly increases both the fertility rate, the workforce participation rate, and the overall level of human capital. Either way, in principle, you can make the math work out.
"I like Hillary," writes the mighty Atrios, "I just don't really like the people she surrounds herself with (with some notable exceptions). As the campaign goes on it'll be harder and harder to rationally distinguish between the two."
I'm not sure I really grasp the content of the distinction. Mark Penn doesn't become a person's political guru by accident. It's worth noting that the general approaches of the sort of political consultants who might do work on a presidential campaign are sufficiently well-known that, by hiring the strategist who determines the strategy, the candidate is, in fact, determining in advance which strategy he or she will be advised to adopt. In short, you don't run a certain sort of campaign because you hired Penn, you hire Penn because you've decided to run a certain sort of campaign. This phenomenon become famous with regard to Bob Shrum, but it's more-or-less true for everyone in the business.
Kriston Capps praises Blake Gopnik's review of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. One problem -- Kriston hasn't actually seen the film. Well, when he was trying his best to see it a week and a half ago, I was actually there in the Hirschorn screening room, and let me tell you that the main difficulty with the film is that it's deadly, deadly boring. One of the most soporific things I've ever seen. Just a really, truly incredibly boring movie. I didn't even dislike it as much as my girlfriend who kept apologizing afterwards for having suggested it (perhaps we were one of Gopnik's "sporty young couples out on dates").
At any rate, Gopnik seems to have missed this part of the enterprise, so let me just repeat once more because I cannot emphasize this enough -- it's a really, really, really boring film. If you're saying to yourself, "man, I'd like to see a dull movie about soccer," though, you should definitely try to check it out.
Trusty correspondent B.U. writes "Since my TV is down I can't check for myself, so you might want to check with others before allowing it to affect your thinking/blogging/whatever, but I'm told Channel 2 now puts Olmert's approval at 0%." Legends of the Israeli Prime Minister's unpopularity do seem to grow by the day. This article has him at three percent. Here he's at two percent. So I don't know for sure, but he's unpopular and with this new report out officially rebuking his handling of the summer 2006 Lebanon War, he seems unlikely to grow more popular.
I forgot to mention one thing about the changeover to The Atlantic, namely that since this blog is now an MSM property it's going to be operating under what I like to think of as MSM rules. In particular, in the future I resolve that:
If a Democrat does something substantively meritorious but politically risky, I'll focus on the political risks.
If a Democrats does something substantively questionable, but politically beneficial, I'll slam him as an opportunist.
If a Democrat does something politically smart and substantively correct, I'll ignore it.
If you'll accept my apologies, the hidden agenda of this post is to try and master the correct deployment of a vertically oriented photo under the new design. That said, this is a "breakfast burrito" as served in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My contention would be that this is really more of a breakfast enchilada, as witnessed by the melted cheese atop the contraption and the fact that many of the key breakfast ingredients -- potatos, sour cream, pico, bacon -- are left outside the tortilla. To my way of thinking, a true breakfast burrito ought to include all the ingredients inside a wrapped tortilla.
At any rate, that's just one New Yorker's perspective, so authentic denizens of those regions of the country better-equipped with inauthentic Mexican food should probably take it with a grain of salt.
A lot of fascinating stuff in this new Pew Survey. One key point is that voters' perceptions of how liberal various Democrats are seems to have no basis whatsoever in reality. Out of the six figures listed -- John Edwards, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton -- Bill Clinton rates as the most liberal, ever-so-slightly to the left of his wife and Pelosi who are tied. This, of course, is ridiculous -- Pelosi is clearly to the left of the Clintons and always has been. Meanwhile, Obama and Edwards both rate as to the right of the Clintons.
In Edwards' case I can at least think of plausible reasons people might make this mistake, but if they're making it about Obama as well it's clear that these numbers are being primarily driven by the public's deep, deep ignorance. Two upshots. One is that it's good news for Edwards to see evidentiary backing for the theory that he can stake out the most progressive issue profile and still maintain an image as a moderate. The other is that this is both terrible news for Clinton (as I wrote with Sam it would be crazy for liberals to choose the least-liberal available nominee when she's also seen as the most liberal choice) and also seems to call into question the "unquestioned brilliance" of Mark Penn. His strategy has been for Clinton to stake out an increasingly conservative issue profile to win the general election. It seems, however, that issue profiles don't do much to alter perceptions of public figures. If they do effect anyone, however, it's going to be the sort of high-information political junkies who are disproportionately likely to be primary-voting liberals who Clinton is managing to alienate in droves.
The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time. Though the UN, European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 US troops may be required to police the war’s aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries’ forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn to several thousand soldiers after a year or two. After Saddam Hussein has been defeated and Iraq occupied installing a decent democratic government in Baghdad should be a manageable task for the United States.
The administration intends to draw down troop levels to 100,000 by the end of the year, with the pullback already well underway as U.S. forces surrender large swaths of the countryside and hunker down in their bases. The plan infuriates many officers, who can only say privately what noncommissioned officers say openly. "In order to fix the situation here," Sabre Squadron's Sergeant José Chavez says, "we need at least 180,000 troops." Iraq, however, will soon have about half that. An effective counterinsurgency strategy may require time and patience. But the war's architects have run out of both.
I've noted this before, but the mostly very sound Princeton Project on National Security engages in this one unfortunate foray into the notion of creating a new international institution called the "Concert of Democracies." Creating such an institution isn't, I think, a bad idea per se but at least some of its proponents have developed what is, I think, the radically unsound view that such a Concert should arrogate to itself the authority to mount military interventions around the world without regard to the UN Security Council. Previous efforts to persuade some of the backers of this idea that it's an essentially neocon concept have tended to fail, but perhaps John McCain's endorsement of the "strong" version of the Concert (he wants to call it a League of Democracies) will convince them.
It's worth saying that along with being a bad idea, this is a somewhat silly proposal since the notion that countries like Brazil, India, South Africa, Indonesia, etc. are clamoring to provide a patina of legitimacy for future American miltiary operations is obviously absurd. I doubt you'd be able to get any substantial European support for this idea, much less backing from the traditional anti-colonial powers of the developing world.
UPDATE: I should mention that I am prepared to publish "view from your breakfast" photos (now that I'm not paying for bandwidth, why not waste it?) if you have any interesting regional specialties. The rarely seen Asian breakfast, in particular, would be appreciated.
Dave Weigel notes that Mitt Romney says his favorite novel is L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth:
"I’m not in favor of his religion by any means,” Mr. Romney, a Mormon, said. “But he wrote a book called ‘Battlefield Earth’ that was a very fun science-fiction book."
Dave comments: "No, that isn't true. Battlefield Earth is awful. Nobody reads that book except Scientologists and smartasses who want to giggle at Scientologists, and even they start to cash out by the 7000th page or so." I'm inclined to agree. I do, however, sympathize with Romney since questions like this are intrinsically hard to answer. I feel like the media's basic setup is that you ask it, then if the politician responds with something lowbrow he'll be criticized for being dumb, and if he responds with something highbrow he'll be criticized for being out-of-touch and aloof. Giving a totally bizarre answer is probably a decent strategy.
Personally, though, if I were running for president I'd site something obscure like Andrei Bely's objectively pro-terrorist modernist classic Petersburg
Jamie Kirchik offers up what's got to be the least convincing attack on non-neoconservatives ever:
The Mauritanians' success--notably, on their own terms and with little foreign intervention--at establishing the basis of a democratic society
in a country that formally outlawed slavery only in 1980, should serve as a challenge to those who claim that democracy is bound to fail in the Arab and Muslim world. Now Iraqis and others can look to the west coast of Africa for an example of Arab liberalism in action.
Where to start? Well, for one thing, it's always great to see a promising election in a troubled developing country. But, obviously, a lot of troubled developing countries have held promising elections over the decades, and there's hardly any guarantee here that Mauritania is now on a glide path to liberty. Beyond that, we're really taking the essentialism of the "Arab liberalism" concept to extreme examples here. Why, exactly, would events in Mauritania prove anything to Iraqis given that the two countries are thousands of miles apart and feature unrelated social conditions?
Also, I don't know how many times this needs to be repeated, but absolutely nobody opposed the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it's intrinsically impossible for Arabs or Muslims to hold elections. That Arabs are capable of doing so, and that in all likelihood at some point we'll see genuine stable democracies in the Arab world, says really nothing at all about the wisdom of efforts to use military coercion to transform totalitarian states into democratic ones.
My John Edwards Problem, And At Least Some of Ours
I actually have several distinct John Edwards problems, but only two of them are worth taking seriously, and this one the more serious of them. The estimable E.J. Dionne writes that "Edwards has decisively thrown in his lot with the party's antiwar wing." This is true on the question of the preferred legislative strategy during the 2007-8 period. On the broader question of national security policy, however, Edwards has, to a remarkable extent, stayed right in the same wing he was in back in the day even though his political persona has transformed from "fresh-faced moderate" to "awesome liberal."
It's important to recall where Edwards was back in 2003-2004, namely left of Joe Lieberman on Iraq but right of John Kerry or Hillary Clinton and running a campaign full of wonky centrist policy proposals including the creation of a domestic intelligence service. No non-Lieberman Democrat still supports the war these days, but Edwards has cast his regret of his support narrowly in terms of bad intelligence rather than broadly in terms of changing his doctrinal view about unilateral preventive war. What's more:
His chief foreign policy guru continues to be his longtime advisor Derek Chollet, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. Edwards also said that his views have also been shaped more recently by a reading list that includes Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security by Kurt Campbell of CSIS and Michael O'Hanlon of Brookings, and and The Good Fight: Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again by Peter Beinart.
That article's from a while back and I'm open to the possibility that things have changed. I do know, however, that between then and now Edwards hired Michael Signer to be his national security policy guy for campaign purposes and that Signer falls in the same ideological neighborhood as the aforementioned crew. Except for Beinart, these names aren't well known in the progressive blogosphere, but the others aren't folks with netroots-friendly views, either. O'Hanlon, in particualr, is well to the right of the New Model Beinart and I wouldn't at all be enthusiastic about the prospect of an administration in which he was given a high-level position.
UPDATE: Why only some of ours? Well, to a lot of people I know, including some people I used to work for, the labor versus Wall Street divide within the party is much more significant than the hawks versus internationalists divide so they're not going to care about this unless the Obama/Edwards contrast on security becomes substantially bigger than the Obama/Edwards contrast on populism. My Obama problem, meanwhile, is boringly similar to questions other people have about his willingness and ability to win a series of knifefights as a presidential nominee (or, more significantly in this context, as a president) once he's risen too high for the Mr. Nice Guy approach to shield him from attacks.
I was hanging out with a buddy last night who was complaining about the now likely-looking prospect of Golden State defeating Dallas. He really wants to see a Dallas-Houston rematch. I had been looking forward to just such a matchup back when I took a Mavericks victory for granted, but that's crazy -- Houston versus Golden State promises the astounding spectacle of Al Harrington attempting to guard Yao Ming and vice versa.
Alternatively, in case of a Utah victory we hardcore fans will at least get to appreciate a second round matchup shockingly free of bankable star power. Boozer! Davis! Nobody's ever heard of these guys!
This is interesting. Utterly without further context or elaboration, Thomas Sowell writes:
When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
I could feign outrage, but I've got to admit that, I, too, have had this thought from time to time especially during moments (see, e.g., 2005) when my political preferences weren't faring well (I never said "decadence," though, it seems to me that only real extremists worry about decadence). That said, even though I write a ton of words every day, I've always had the good sense to not actually write it because even bloggers know that you shouldn't publish every random crazy thought that pops into your head. What was Sowell thinking? More to the point, how is it that nobody at Creator's Syndicate or National Review Online stopped this from going to press?
TNR in its weird way invited me to write a response to Jonathan Chait's big article on the netroots and here it is. I have almost endlessly complicated thoughts on this subject, but since I was writing in TNR I focused primarily on Chait's rather odd understanding of the netroots/TNR relationship rather than the many other issues that are in play.
I think it's interesting that Atrios says he named Jon Chait as his favorite columnist just a few years ago. When I was interviewing for jobs in journalism back in the spring of 2003 this question came up a lot and I always named Jon in this regard. It occurs to me that this probably isn't a coincidence. More than anything else, Chait's brand of "ass-welt reporting" prefigured blogging in a significant way. His method was, is, and probably always will be fairly marginal in the magazine world but has really come into its own on the internet.
Thomas Edsall's latest piece for TNR is, I think, a great example of why the sort of "interested in ideas" / "interested in consequences" dichotomy that Jon Chait in part relies on in his article on the netroots doesn't really hold up. What Edsall thinks, it seems to me, is that when Harry Reid made is "war is lost" comment he raised the stakes in an unnecessarily risky way under circumstances where it would have been better to say something like "Bush has lost the war." The claim that "Bush has lost the war" is a more politically effective message than "the war is lost" seems reasonable, and writing a column on that subject is a reasonable thing to do.
A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.
Interesting. Tyler Cowen observes that "The effect is big enough that an all-white team would, all other things equal, win two extra games over the course of an 82-game season." Of course, all other things are unlikely to be equal if you try and field an all-white team. Which, of course, leads to the ever popular question of who makes the All-White Team. My ballot has Okur at center, David Lee and Dirk Nowitzki at the forwards, and Nash and Ginobili in the backcourt.
A single, childless, male individual in good health such as myself generally has the privilege of not really thinking much about health care except as a very abstract political/policy issue. Then comes the day when you come to speak to the benefits manager at your new job and you realize . . . America's health care system is really terrible! The sheer quantity of forms and things to consider is mind-boggling, to say nothing of the sob story of rising premiums now being passed on to new employees in the form of the 90/80 PPO plan switching soon to a 90/70 plan, etc., etc., etc., etc.
The sheer reduction in the level of mental energy -- to say nothing of actual time, economic resources, colores pieces of paper, etc. -- expended on this kind of thing seems like a good enough reason to move to a simple national health insurance scheme.
Roughly six-in-ten people in the Pew sample (59 percent) said they want their member of Congress to back an Iraq funding bill that includes a timeline for American troops to begin withdrawing. Of that 59 percent, more than half (54 percent) said Democrats should "insist" on a timeline's inclusion in the legislation while 42 percent backed the party working with Republicans and the Bush Administration on a solution.
By contrast, only 33 percent of the overall sample said they preferred that their lawmaker oppose a timeline as part of the Iraq funding bill.
There's no real tactical justification for indicating that Democrats are ready, willing, and eager to back down. The public's on their side. Maybe Hoyer wants to capitulate because he opposes the timeline on the merits (he's one of the few "Hard Power Democrats" Michael O'Hanlon praises by name, after all) but if that's the case he shouldn't have backed the bill Bush just vetoed.
To get super-self-referential meta, I liked Reihan Salam's comment on my comment on Jonathan Chait's comment on the blogosphere.
On a broader note, I think cleaving Ross from Reihan has made them both stronger, like if you chopped one of those regenerative lizards in half (and, of course, if regenerative lizards could regenerate after such a devastating injury).
Via Ross Douthat, Edward Luttwak has a curious article in the British Prospect making the provocative argument that "the Middle East doesn't matter." In fact, though Luttwak doesn't doesn't seem to see it this way, he's simply endorsing the traditional anti-imperialist view that the best solution to America's problems in the region is to simply . . . get less involved and Middle Easterners go their own way.
He differentiates himself from the left in a few ways. One is to use insulting rhetoric like calling the Middle East "backwards" and other similar language liberals wouldn't use. Second, he invents a straw position he disagrees with which holds "that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge." Third, and most interestingly, he denies the significance of the Israel-Palestine conflict:
Yes, it would be nice if Israelis and Palestinians could settle their differences, but it would do little or nothing to calm the other conflicts in the middle east from Algeria to Iraq, or to stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, or the different varieties of inter-Muslim violence between traditionalists and Islamists, and between Sunnis and Shia, nor would it assuage the perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists towards the transgressive west that relentlessly invades their minds, and sometimes their countries.
Some of this seems clearly true, but the part at the end is wildly unconvincing. Luttwak speaks of the "perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists toward the transgressive west that relentlessly invades their minds, and sometimes their countries." This seems to suggest that there's a binary "hostility/non-hostility" dynamic, when obviously the real issue is how many people are hostile and how hostile are they. Arabs and Muslims are, clearly, quite hostile to Israel and since the US is such a heavy backer of Israel, some of this hostility attaches to us. If there were a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there'd be less hostility to Israel and therefore less hostility to the United States. The alternative would be to radically curtail our backing for Israel, which Luttwak should really say clearly if it's what he intends to propose.
That said, it's a very interesting article that makes many sound points.
I have to say, I think there's something a bit sad about Antawn Jamison trying to act weird so he can fit in on the Wizards. I mean, yelling "Fiji" after your jumpers because "When you think of water, you think of my jump shot." That's genuinely odd, not charmingly eccentric.
Craig explains my thinking on the subject of regenerative lizards: "some reptiles will regenerate tails. Specifically some geckos (Leopard gecko being one) will lose tails as a way of getting away from a predator. It does grow back." Pithlord, however, has the goods:
Right, but you don't get a whole new lizard. If you do it right, you can bisect a starfish and get two. Advantage: starfish!
I was ragging a bit on John Edwards' national security record yesterday, but there's no question that what he's been saying lately has been very congenial. Here, thanks to Jonathan Singer is Edwards speaking in Portland on the subject of the "war on terror" rhetorical construct:
And I don't know how many of you even noticed this or how many of you watched the Democratic presidential debate from South Carolina, but I suspect some of you did. But a question was asked whether you agree with the language - the Bush language, which is what it is - "Global War on Terror." And I did not. And I said, I took that position at the debate... [Applause] This is a political frame and political rhetoric. They use it to justify everything they do. They use that language to justify the war in Iraq. They use it to justify Guantanamo. They use it to justify torture. They use it to justify illegal spying on the American people. [Applause] It is time for us to quit kowtowing to these people. We have to say what we really believe. Now, are there really dangerous people in the world? Of course there are. We need to be smart and aggressive and intelligent, use intelligence - did I say dangerous people? - we have to use intelligence to fight them and stop them. Everybody recognizes that. But the one thing that's been proven beyond any doubt as a result of what's happened in the last six years is raw power alone will never make you a leader. You actually have to have the moral authority.
Quite right and good for him. What I'm really waiting for, though, is a clearer explanation of how and why it is Edwards came to revise his views over the years.
UPDATE: Petey assures me the answers I'm looking for are in Mike Allen's Time article, but I need to leave now and can't read it. No worries -- more blog later!
With regard to this morning's snark against Steny Hoyer, I should say I've gotten some pushback from Hill folks who say the media is straining to find intra-caucus divisions ("Democrats in disarray," don'tcha know) rather than legislative leaders simply doing the job correctly by keeping the lines of communication open with the other side. We'll see; Hoyer's record makes me skeptical, but it's true that one shouldn't leap to conclusions.
I've been waiting for a good issue to disagree with Ross about, and here we are: incest. He says he doesn't think we'll see a big push to legalize it: "not because the right to incest doesn't arguably follow from the logic of gay marriage, as Jacoby says, but because I think the demand for marrying one's sister is far too low to overcome the 'ick' factor involved. The gay population is small, but not that small - even at 2-4 percent of the American population, it's large enough to create both a mass constituency for gay marriage and a still-larger percentage of Americans who count homosexuals as their friends and neighbors, and understandably wish them happiness as a result."
Okay, wait, I sort of do agree with that. It's hard to see a mass movement to legalize incest emerging. That said, if you had a genuinely consensual, adult, incestuous couple and some prosecutor took it into his head to charge them with a crime, I think you would see a serious countermovement. The couple would, among other things, have a decent constitutional case after the Lawrence decision and that alone would ensure a drawn-out battle that eventually becomes reasonably high profile. And a lot of people who would never dream of pre-emptively joining a pro-incest mass movement (me, say) might still be horrified by the idea of throwing two people in jail just for having sex with each other.
At any rate, the punditry world needs new controversies since I think the gay marriage debate has already become dull, so I certainly hope incest becomes a hot issue. Bestiality, interestingly, strikes me as a morally tougher issue.
It's got to have been over a year now since it became absolutely entrenched dogma in Washington, DC that the situation in Iraq fundamentally required a political solution, and that part of the key to a political solution was a law governing the distribution of Iraq's oil assets that was broadly acceptable throughout that country. In 2003, emphasizing the need for a political solution was something only crackpot liberals did. In 2004, same deal. By 2005, people were cracking. By 2006, this was the Bush administration's line. Only they also wanted to have 130,000 troops in the field and so forth.
By 2007, though, still nobody's acting like they mean it. So, now, today we read "Iraqi Blocs Opposed to Oil Bill". Oops! Getting a compromise oil law has been the top political priority for the U.S. in Iraq since at least the Zalmay Khalilzad days, and we keep not making progress toward that goal. Nevertheless, the military's still there in Iraq fighting away even though nobody thinks their efforts can succeed without success -- permanently elusive success, it seems -- on the political track.
It's one of the pillars of our criminal justice system but, unfortunately, it's totally unreliable.
One thing in particular that I recall reading about is the shoddy epistemics of the police lineup. Faced with a group of six dudes standing in a room, your would-be witness points the finger at whichever of the six guys he feels is probably the guilty party. The possibility that the guilty criminal simply isn't in the room doesn't "play," pyschologically speaking. The way the game is understood, the police have caught the criminal. The criminal is in the room. The witnesses role in the game is to correctly identify the criminal the police have already caught. Saying "he's not here" doesn't figure into that understanding, so it doesn't happen, and -- bam -- you've got an eyeball witness to your crime.
I find myself aggravated by The New Republic's pro-surge editorial thanks to my allergy to their brand of bold truth-telling. Similarly, an aversion to bold truth-telling undergirds my disquiet at Marty Peretz's blowjob to Fouad Ajami.
Acquired this breakfast burrito from McDonald's this morning. It's not really as delcious as the Santa Fe version but it does more closely conform to my understanding of the structural properties of a burrito.
Let me repeat that I am eager to publish a series of breakfast photos if people will email me JPEGs and/or links to Flickr pages. I'm particularly interested in the mysterious breakfasts of the Orient, but will accept pretty much any kind of breakfast. Now that I'm alongside Sullivan, I need to step up my game and that can only be achieved with the help of you, the readers.
London, Thursday 3 May 2007 – Washington-bassed political commentator and journalist, Michael Tomasky, has been appointed editor of Guardian America, the Guardian's US website. He takes up his new post on 7 May and will be responsible for developing the Guardian's online presence in America.
Congratulations to Mike and to The Guardian, I think it's a very good match.
For the record, here's Jon Chait's response to me -- I think the view that The New Republic isn't committed to right-wing Israeli nationalism is pretty self-evidently absurd. Beyond that, what Kevin said and I agree with Kevin that Armando is making sense here.
I like to think that I've made a somewhat serious effort over the years to understand the impact of budget deficits on economic growth and I must admit that I'm stymied. Both the centrist and populist factions have reasonable-sounding arguments on the table, and it seems to turn on things that are beyond my technical capabilities. The fact that the great bulk of professional economists seem to me to be on the centrist side carries some weight, but it's far from decisive and there are ample credentialed economists on the populist side as well.
I am, however, a moderately trained moral philosopher and can tell you that the objection that deficits "place an unfair financial burden on future generations" doesn't make a ton of sense. Think about an individual taking out a large loan for some reason or other -- a mortgage to buy a house, say. This may be a prudent investment, or it may be a foolish one. Whether or not the loan amounts to an "unfair financial burden" on future versions of yourself isn't an additional issue on top of the issue of how well your investment performs.
It's similar with deficits. If moderate levels of deficit spending allow us to finance growth-enhancing public sector investments, then there's no burden at all being placed on future generations. Conversely, if moderate levels of deficit spending are "crowding out" enough private investment to counteract the beneficial impact of additional public spending then this is a sufficient reason not to do it all on its own. People like to think there's an independent, ethical issue here because since it wouldn't hinge on technical macroeconomic issues you can deploy the ethical issue in the form of effective political rhetoric or punditry aimed at a broad audience, but the technical question really does need to be answered. If Cheney was right and deficits don't matter for growth, then they also don't matter as a question of political morality.
Part of Andrew's quote of the day is Harvey Mansfield's assertion "that if America is an empire, it is the first empire that always wants an exit strategy."
I don't think that's really true. I've been reading Robert Meredith's book on The Fate of Africa lately, and one striking thing about the section on decolonization from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s was precisely the extent to which in many circumstances the imperial powers were looking for an exit strategy. Outside of the unusual case of Algeria, it was almost never the stated policy of England or France (Portugal was different) that they wanted to stay forever. Instead, as with the US in Iraq, there was always just a reason you couldn't leave right now, and then another reason, and some more problems, etc., etc., etc.
Some of Edwards' fans had assured me that this Time article would cure me of my doubts about John Edwards' national security record and agenda, but it really doesn't. It does make me think somewhat better of Edwards, but it's also a bit orthagonal to my main concerns. Here's the money quote:
"This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do," Edwards said in a phone interview from Everett, Wash. "It's been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there's a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don't think that's true."
That's good stuff. What I want to hear from Edwards, though, is something about the evolution of his thought. Why is it that in the 2004 campaign he was for creating a domestic intelligence service and for invading Iraq, and now three years later he's not for those things? Not that I think he's an evil flip-flopper, I believe I've made exactly that journey on those issues. I could, however, provide for you an account of what I was thinking at the time, why I've changed my mind, and what lessons that offers me for my thinking about future foreign policy issues.
I haven't heard that from Edwards and the staffing decisions he's made don't give me a ton of confidence that he's drawn the right ones. I also note that Petey's taken to arguing in comments that one good thing about Edwards is that he can get more forward-leaning politically on things like "war on terror" rhetoric because he's in a stronger position politically as the fabled southern white man candidate. A different interpretation is that he's in a weaker position politically (running third in the polls and in the fundraising) and sees his only viable strategy as running way to the left in the primary.
Tom Lee brings the intellectual honesty, and he's right -- it's silly to say the numbers are "just numbers," (hexadecimal numbers, in this case) anything can be represented as numbers. This number is part of an encryption scheme. The problem with the DMCA's "anti-circumvention" provisions is just that they're bad policy, not that you "can't own numbers" or whatever. But they are bad policy.
In tonight's games, I think the home team wins both times. Ultimately, it seems to me that Houston can carry the Jazz, but this series has been a lot closer than I anticipated. Certainly the Rockets need to worry that AK-47 seems to be getting some his old mojo back. I do wonder if Golden State really just matches up incredibly well with Dallas, or if the gelled, healthy version of the Warriors is genuinely this good.
When I first got Quicksilver I thought it was neat, but didn't totally understand the whole "our app will change your life" rhetoric around it. Well, today I'm here at my Atlantic desk (I've mostly been at home) using the office Mac and I'm punching away at some keys like an idiot wondering why the program isn't launching. Maybe I need to hit the key-combination harder, I think. And then it hits me -- no Quicksilver.
Also indispensible (and relevant to PC users) -- Pandora.
Ross wants to know. Fortunately, while I got a C+ in my one class on American politics and public policy, this is actually something I know about thanks to the tireless labors of Richard Heck.
My advice (though not, I think, Professor Heck's) would be to read Michael Dummett's Truth and Other Enigmas. I think Ross won't be thrilled with the somewhat relativistic conclusions, but the good news from his point of view is that my understanding is that Dummett is a practicing Catholic.
In the midst of an interesting post on his disagreements with myself and Ezra Klein, Mickey Kaus writes:
For example, Democrats aren't going to fix the schools unless they in effect bust the teachers' unions. If you make that point, is it because you want to bolster your credentials as an independent-minded blogger or because you want to fix the schools?
As it happens, some of my favorite people are neoliberal education policy analysts and it's genuinely not so hard to tell the difference. Someone who wants to fix the schools and says mean things about teacher's unions because they believe teacher's unions are an impediment to improving American education will, for example, write on a range of education-related topics and engage in various education-related debates. Kaus's interest in education policy, by contrast, begins and ends with his dislike of the teacher's unions. And, not incidentally, there are all kinds of other unions -- all unions, as best I can tell -- that Kaus doesn't like.
Not the most substantive observation, I'll admit, but watching the GOP debate it's hard to avoid the sense that ten candidates is an awful lot. Maybe they could do random lotteries to pick five out of the ten to participate in any given debate or something. Things wound up totally lacking in structure and focus.
So, like most people I started off thinking a snowball had a better chance in hell than Rudy Giuliani did of winning the GOP presidential nomination. Then, as time passed, the snowball kept not melting and I started to, well, theorize. Watching the debate, though, it's clear that Giuliani has not, in fact, come up with a deft way to parry his vulnerability on abortion. It also comes across as even clearer that he hasn't come up with a deft way to parry his less known (at the moment) vulnerability on immigration. He just, I think, hasn't really been attacked on these grounds yet by anyone. Faced with the modest probing of the debate, however, he had nothing.
Mitt Romney, by contrast, managed to remind me a bit of why he was able to con me into voting for him 2002. Like a lot of fairly liberal Massachusetts types who must have also voted for him in that election (he won, after all) I feel once bitten twice shy about the whole thing and he now plays to me as a transparent fraud. Conservatives around the country, however, haven't had that experience and I bet he looks different to a lot of them.
James B. Comey, who was number two at the justice department until DOJ went into super-hack mode in 2005 says the Attorneys Bush fired were great with only one exception. "Perhaps most damaging to the Justice Department was Comey's description of Carol C. Lam of San Diego as 'a fine U.S. attorney.'"
Hot Pew Center data released a couple of days ago shows that the pendulum has swung decisively back from its mid-nineties skepticism about the welfare state and the social safety net. Older Americans, white Americans, and poor Americans all showed large increases in their level of interest in big government, meaning that for the next couple of cycles we may not be finding ourselves wondering what's the matter with Kansas (except that Kansas is actually has a high median income, a low poverty rate, etc., and will probably stay firmly Republican).
This is part of what makes the prospect of a presidential campaign -- to say nothing of a White House -- substantially guided by the Mark Penn worldview so frightening. If there ever was a time for Penn-ism in the Democratic Party it was in the years 1995-97 when, not coincidentally, he first cemented his relationship with the Clintons and landed in the top ranks of the consultantocracy. Things have, however, changed since then and I see no evidence that Penn and similar operators have taken this into account (to be fair, a lot of people who are right at the moment refuse to acknowledge that more centrist approaches were probably right in the past; liberal political operatives are just as good as centrist ones at finding ways to assimilate new evidence to their pre-existing worldviews).
Yes: Dallas-Golden state -- thrilling! What can you say? I'm sure I'll think of something. But let's talk about something else. Fourteen points on sixty percent shooting, five rebounds, five blocks, four assists, three steals, and just one turnover. It's as if Houston ran into a well-known semi-automatic rifle of some kind. The re-emergence of AK-47 has potentially enormous implications for the Jazz next season. A little while back, Utah had a bad team led by a fantastic -- but wildly unorthodox -- Russian star.
Then the team became pretty good thanks to the emergence of Williams, and the return of Carlos Boozer, alongside Mehmet Okur and a ton of frontcourt depth. Kirilenko, though, got lost in the mix. If next year we see the Kirlenko we saw in 2002-2006, then this is a very, very, very dangerous team (and also probably a team that should trade some of its frontcourt talent -- really excessive, in some ways -- for a real shooting guard).
It's a small-circulation political magazine battle royal as Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect faces off against Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard at the Campaign for America's Future event on "The Failure of Conservatism."
This also seems like the best moment to note that Rick Perlstein, historian and journalist, is now doing a blog for the Campaign for America's Future website.
This comes from the blog's official little brother. I used to roll that way myself. More recently, however, I came to the conclusion that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Nick also comments:
Also, FYI, Japanese breafast (at least traditionally) is about as interesting/gross as you could hope for. I also hear that in Iceland some people mix one part skyr with one part porridge (skyr is yogurt I think), but of course you've actually been to Iceland and so should know better than I.
I would say that skyr certainly resembles yogurt -- really thick yogurt -- but I'm not sure that it is yogurt per se. I don't recal seeing anyone eat this skyr/porridge mix for breakfast, but people definitely eat it there. I've got some more breakfast photos on file now, but if you come up with anything interesting, send it over.
Giuliani said the only thing worse than an American-led military offensive against Iran would be Iran having nuclear weapons, which he called "the worst nightmare'' of the Cold War. The way to stop Iran, he said, was resolute American leadership facing down the Iranian president.
"He has to look at an American president, and he has to see Ronald Reagan,'' Giuliani said.
Is that the version of Ronald Reagan who sold the Iranians weapons, or it is the version that sought to check Iranian power by sending Don Rumsfeld to Baghdad to assure Saddam Hussein that the United States didn't really mind if he used poison gas to attack the Kurdish civilian population?
Since some of the Republican candidates seem to have indicated that they don't believe in evolution, let me offer my perennial warning on this subject -- people who don't believe in evolution are dead wrong, but there are actually a very large number of them in the United States -- depending on how you count, it's about half of the population. So taking the creationist line or hesitating is a very understandable reaction for a practical politician.
John Hollinger has this right. When you think about the Dallas-Golden State series, they key thing has been Golden State's defense even more than the brilliance of Baron Davis. Since both Utah and (especially) Houston have real low-post big men, Golden State's success arguably may not carry forward into the second round. On the other hand, the Mavericks are a much better offensive team than either the Rockets or the Jazz so even middling schemes may be enough to beat them.
While Mitt Romney impressed me and most other reporters with his presentation, it would be good for some to observe that he also put forward a completely insane policy idea on the leading issue of the day:
We’ll move everything to get him. But I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there’s going to be another and another. This is about Shi’a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate.
To put it bluntly, the trouble here is that the Muslim Brotherhood just isn't a violent terrorist organization, and certainly doesn't commit acts of violence against the United States. It's an extremely traditionalist multinational civil society organization. It's true that a lot of violent types used to be in the Brotherhood and now they're in terrorist groups, but used to be is the key phrase here, they left the Brotherhood because the Brotherhood wouldn't sign on for their agenda. In one clause, Romney's just gone and broadened the war to include a huge new category of people who have no intention of waging war against the United States or even against Israel.
Note that even without the Muslim Brotherhood bit, this is a terrible idea. If you liked Iraq, you're going to love trying to root Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon and Hamas out of the West Bank. Check out Spencer's remarks on this as well. He notes that "it's hardly remarkable that Romney doesn't know what he's talking about." It isn't surprising, but then again this point needs to be driven home again and again -- Mitt Romney displayed zero understanding of political Islam or global terrorism, none of his Republican opponents called him on it, and as far as I know, nobody in the press (the same press, you'll recall, that's concerned with the Pursuit of Truth above all else) bothered to notice.
Speaking of which, I keep meaning to mention Mark Waid's Empire -- it's cool. In particular, I think it puts two interesting twists on the cliché dystopia genre. One is that it seems to me to endorse Richard Rorty's interesting, but deeply unpopular, reading of 1984 -- namely that Truth and Justice do not prevail. In a world where Golgoth prevails and imposes his will on the entire world, there's no realm of "goodness" outside the world to condemn him. He is either opposed or he isn't, and by the end of the book it appears that he isn't. Might has made right.
The other thing is that by blending the dystopia genre with the superhero genre Waid nicely, I think, demonstrates the essential absurdity of much dystopian literature. He's provided the most plausible account I've ever seen of how a dystopian system could remain stable for the long term and it involves . . . superpowers. In the real world, totalitarian systems are intrinsically subject to collapse due to falling-outs among the leadership clique.
The list of Jewish anti-semites gets longer: Adventures of Kavalier and Clay author Michael Chabon hates the Jews. Maybe someone could just publish a list of American Jews who aren't anti-semites and it would be shorter.
Brad Plumer points out that Mitt Romney's stance on the Muslim Brotherhood is actually well to the right of the Bush administration. So if you think the problem for the past few years has been that George W. Bush is a weak-kneed appeaser, I think Mitt's got to be your man.
I'd heard frightening rumors that Robert Kagan had written a column praising Barack Obama that should send shivers down my spine. Mostly, I found Kagan to be accurate but unthreatening. It's true that Obama is not proposing to dismantle the American national security apparatus, and that some (though not me) will be disappointed by this. On one key issue, though, Kagan really does ascribe to Obama a view I find objectionable:
Obama never once says that military force should be used only as a last resort. Rather, he insists that "no president should ever hesitate to use force -- unilaterally if necessary," not only "to protect ourselves . . . when we are attacked," but also to protect "our vital interests" when they are "imminently threatened." That's known as preemptive military action.
Perhaps using unilateral force to protect imminently threatened vital interests is known as "preemptive military action." The Bush administration, meanwhile, with the support of people like Robert Kagan, has put forward a doctine of unilateral preventive military action to counter non-imminent threats. Then they decided to call this doctrine "preemption." Thus, through sleight-of-hand Obama comes to agree with Bush. In the real world, though, as Martin Peretz correctly notes Obama's views seem closer to Al Gore's than to Bush's or Kagan's -- supportive of a very robust American military capability, willing to use that capacity in a variety of circumstances, but not interested in making unilateral military strikes (or threats of strikes) the centerpiece of America's non-proliferation efforts. At least that would be my guess.
Admittedly, we're all conjecturing based on rather limited textual evidence. But it seems significant that in the case of Iraq, Gore and Obama came down on one side of the issue, while Kagan and Bush came down on another. Neither Gore nor Obama are "doves" in the sense of wanting to curtaul US military capabilities, but unless their views different in some important ways from the Bush/Kagan view it's hard to see why they would reach different conclusions about a significant concrete issue.
This chart shows the civilian employment-population ratio, a statistic that eliminates some of the vagaries of the unemployment rate by just asking how many people have jobs rather than whether or not the people in question are "unemployed" per se (as opposed to being full-time students, or homemakers, etc.). As you'll see, the ratio dipped quite a bit at the beginning of the new millenium as the stock bubble burst, and then stayed substantially lower than it had been during the 1990s boom throughout Bush's much-touted recovery and now has started declining again without ever reaching the old peak or even the late-1970s peak.
Brad tells us that "the employment-to-population ratio is usually a lagging indicator--it doesn't start to decline significantly until after a recession is well under way" which doesn't sound like good news. I do see one instance in 1994-95 of an upswing in the ratio temporarily reversing just in time to give the GOP control of congress (people forget that aspect of the '94 midterms -- to some extent, it was the economy, stupid) before continuing upwards again.
My friend T.W. took this photo in China at a supermarket which he says "puts Whole Foods to shame (pasta made fresh on the premises! Several varities of live turtle on offer!" He also alleges that it's a breakfast food -- "a crepe of sorts." He has a different photo of a similar item which includes "egg, scallions, cilantro, some sort of pickle, hot sauce, sweet brown sauce, and a crispy rice cracker folded into it: it's much better than it sounds." That photo, however, is really fuzzy, so I went with this other one that has "no cilantro, pickles, or crispy thing."
For record, in my opinion horizontally oriented photos really work better with the site's layout, so if you have the option, send one of those.
I've been a little disappointed by Feist's new album The Reminder which doesn't really live up to the brilliance of Let It Die. That said, we're talking about a very high standard here and some of it is quite good, including "1, 2, 3, 4"
Nobody who watches the video can avoid commenting on its curious resemblance to a GAP ad, which mostly makes me think the Gap should hire Leslie Feist to appear in an ad, but is certianly weird one way or the other.
I think the Rockets can win it at home tonight, and think the Jazz are really going to regret the way that season-end slide cost them home court advantage since this has wound up being a really tight series. I think Yao's low post skills and T-Mac's size and ability to elevate mean Houston won't have Dallas-esque problems with the Warriors, but of course I was quite sure Dallas would beat Golden State so I think everyone's opinions about their next matchup are essentially worthless.
UPDATE: Yikes -- gotta check that schedule. I just assumed they wouldn't schedule a round two game before the completion of round one, but Chicago-Detroit kicks off tonight. My heart says Bulls; if they can dismantle one Eastern Conference dinosaur, then why not two?
I normally find myself a relatively harsh judge of films, but I just can't bring myself to concur with the general tone of approbation I'm hearing about this movie. Hokey dialogue? Charming. Plot that doesn't really make sense?
Well, it's a movie about a kid who got bit by a radioactive spider, thus granting him the ability to stick to things, a "spidey sense" to warn of him danger, and the "proportionate strength of a spider" and, meanwhile, by coincidence he just so happens to have developed a technological apparatus to help him shoot spider webs so, no, the part about a particle accelerator misshap turning Flint Marko into a sand monster doesn't make sense either.
UPDATE: By "approbation" up top I of course mean "disapprobation." Promises I may have made about cutting down on typos are no longer operative.
Okay, you probably don't "need" to know anything about the Scottish Labour Party's historic defeat at the hands of the Scottish National Party in the regional elections, but Alex Massie's blog is the go-to place for Scottish punditry. See especially here, though this on Gordon Brown may have wider significance.
According to Christopher Hitchens, Karl Rove says "I'm not fortunate enough to be a person of faith." Jon Chait comments:
. If you don't believe in God, then why would you think believers are "fortunate" for putting their faith in a nonexistent higher being? You wouldn't. Yet Rove, for political reasons, must genuflect to the notion that religious people are morally superior to atheists. The line perfectly encapsulates the condescending and way Republican elites have manipulated religion.
I don't think calling religious believers "fortunate" is the same thing as calling them "morally superior." I've heard plenty of atheists remark that they envy religious people their faith in God, an afterlife, the beneficence of the universe, or what-have-you. This sentiment isn't universal, obviously (see Hitchens himself for a counter-example), but I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone who's convinced that life is a meaningless round of pleasure, pain, and Machiavellian campaigning that ends when you die to feel a little envious of people who believe something slightly more optimistic.
I see Ross's point, but at the end of the day I think Chait's right and it's pretty condescending. By contrast, I think it's not at all condenscending to say something like "I wish it were the case that my destiny were in the ends of a benevolent higher power." I could use the help! But what Rove is different, and condescending, Rove is saying he wishes he thought the world were like that, but, sadly, he knows better. Ross is right that this is a fairly commonly expressed view, but it also seems like a clearly condescending one, designed to position the un-believer as the one willing to tell invoncenient truths while believers go about their merry way.
Apparently, Pandora, which I was just praising the other day, is in big trouble thanks to looming internet radio royalty hikes. Good news for incumbent broadcasters!
Yesterday, Joe Klein had the best observation I've seen on the GOP debate: "Listening to the Republicans, you'd never guess that this was a country 70% of the public thinks is heading in the wrong direction."
Exactly so. I re-watched most of the debate today, and this was the standout quality. You had all these candidates engaging in a kind of "how many angels fit on the head of a pin" conversation about tax reform (flat tax! fair tax! consumption tax! repeal the 16th amendment!) that was almost totally disconnected from anyone trying to claim that their policies were going to address some kind of anxiety people have. The one candidate who did it -- John McCain proposing a $3,000 refundable health care tax credit -- said it in an utterly affectless manner and the policy proposal is both pretty dumb and clearly inadequate to the scope of the country's health care issues.
On national security, the candidates didn't convey any real sense that American policy has been running into any kind of problems.
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Heads in the Sand
