Marketing Apocalypse
I'm excited about the idea of a Jazz-Warriors series, but the NBA front office people must not be. When was the last time we had a second round matchup featuring so few recognizable names?
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May 6, 2007 - May 12, 2007 Archives
May 6, 2007
The View From Your Breakfast
That's from the blogosphere's own Reihan Salam.
Nonzero, Damnit
"Any rational observer would say that if the war's lost, then someone won the war," according to John McCain, "Al Qaeda will win that war." This is very insightful if you're dumb. By the same token, if buying my MacBook was a smart idea for me, I must have been ripping Apple off. Similarly, again, if Japan got rich by exporing goods to the West, the United States and Europe must have gotten poorer during Japan's great expansion.
In the real world, interactions between human beings are often other than zero sum (see Bob Wright's book). The Iraq War is, at this point, far beyond matters of "winning" and "losing." Saddam Hussein certainly lost the war, so does that mean we won? No, it means that both Saddam's regime and the American people are worse off than we might have otherwise been. There's little evidence that America's failure to accomplish its mission in Iraq is likely to lead al-Qaeda to taking over the country (as opposed to, say, a lot of factional warfare -- Sunnis versus Shiites, al-Qaeda versus Sunni nationalists, Sadrists versus SCIRI, Kurds versus Arabs) and certainly no reason to think we should keep compounding a policy error just to show Osama bin Laden that we're really, really stubborn.
Earning My Keep
I sort of feel like I should be hyping Atlantic content, but all the real articles are subscription-only, so what's the point? Brian Mockenhaupt talking about his article on military training in the latest issue is interesting, though less interesting than the actual article:
But at the same time the drill sergeants are going to explain that situations will arise when shooting is not the answer because it will turn against you down the road. It might be really hard, especially when you’re under fire, and you’ve been taking casualties, and you feel that a neighborhood might be against you. But to win in the end you need to exercise extreme prudence and restraint. For someone who has only been in the military for a short time, this can be a difficult lesson.
To my mind, probably the big thing that makes me skeptical about the idea that better manual and training regimes will make counterinsurgency viable is that this lesson is not only hard to teach, but needs to be taught almost perfectly. Say 95 percent of your soldiers take the training and act perfectly. Well, if you're got 100,000 soldiers in Iraq, that means 5,000 guys who are two quick to open fire. Over the course of six months or so, 5,000 heavily armed trigger-happy soldiers can kill and main a lot of people and destroy a ton of property. There's your alienated population right there. And yet, a 95 percent success rate is very high.
Polarization
John Quiggen makes an important point. An awful lot of the recent changes in American history can be understood as efforts to graft a proper two-party dynamic onto a country that thanks to both an unusual institutional set-up and the legacy of the Civil War and Jim Crow didn't really have one. The rise of the "New Right" essentially turned the GOP into one half of a two-party system, at which point it became devastatingly effective because the opposition was still behaving like one half of the old, more fluid system. Much recent progressive activism has centered around trying to turn the Democrats into "the other party" of a two-party system.
Head to Heads
New polls show John Edwards and Barack Obama both crushing either Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, while Hillary Clinton is in tight races with both of them, and Mitt Romney gets demolished by everyone.
Drawing lessons will be left as an exercise for the reader. I have to say, though, that if Romney's going to be a kind of fake conservative and really unpopular, that it's hard to see what the rationale for his candidacy is supposed to be.
Harsh
Discussing Spiderman 3 I described myself as "usually a relatively harsh judge of films" to which Scott Lemieux replied, "dude, you like Michael Bay movies."
That seems to the point, and actually explains my Spiderman-related perplexity. Introspecting a bit, I think I'm harsher than most movie fans on highbrow indie stuff and also on Hollywood comedies, but also much, much, much more forgiving of summer popcorn movies.
Suns-Spurs
Didn't watch the Cavs-Nets but I'm eager to see Suns-Spurs. This is obviously a tough one to call. I'd very much like to see Phoenix win at this point. San Antonio won my affection by slaying the Lakers juggernaut back in the day, but today they've become their own tedious juggernaut. At this point, it's probably passé to be a Suns enthusiast (and, frankly, Shawn Marion's whining's become annoying) but they're still fun to watch.
As Jon Barry just said on TV, however, "I just see the San Antonio Spurs doing it again." To -- unlike Barry -- cite some actual evidence for that proposition, I note that San Antonio's regular season point differential was substantially better than Phoenix's (8.4 versus 7.3) even though San Antonio rested its key players much more. But, of course, home court counts in this league.
He Might Ruin The Place!?!
I'm not sure if I was more surprised or appalled to see Kevin Drum quote approvingly this passage from a rather silly Sally Quinn column:
The biggest problem that Obama has is this: We don't know who he is. Who are his people? Whom does he surround himself with? Whom does he listen to? Who gives him advice? He's so new to the national political scene that he hasn't had time to choose the team that would be with him in the White House. The more we see him in action, he's still just campaigning. He still has the quality of an unknown. And as attractive and likable as Obama is, we still need references.
Kevin goes deep on this paragraph, complaining that Dreams From My Father didn't give him a real sense of Obama, but the next paragraph indicates that Quinn's issue is that she doesn't know enough about his advisory team. Indeed, the way it's written strongly implies that Obama doesn't have a staff, or that who's on it is secret. But as Reed Hundt points out this is totally wrong:
Actually there have been dozens of articles about his team, including discussions of his economic advisers, fundraisers, experienced and capable Senate staff, and others. Just in terms of policy alone, a friend of mine, Karen Kornbluh, happens to be his chief policy director in the Senate office. Matt Alexander, otherwise a professor of law at Seton Hall, is his campaign policy director.
One could add Austin Goolsbee on economics, Samantha Power and Susan Rice on national security issues, etc. I have this sneaking suspicion that Quinn's objection is that she doesn't know Obama personally. She's willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he "need[s] references" -- people she knows personally. Quinn's job in this scheme, is to pass judgment on political figures based on her personally familiarity either with them or with his or her key "references" at which point the voters go along meekly with her choice.
Note also that totally missing in her column is the customary -- and at least somewhat apt! -- complaint that Obama has said enough about actual policy issues since, of course, policy is for losers and serious analysts rely on the social register (or something) to make their choices.
UPDATE: Kevin says he didn't mean to endorse Quinn's argument but, rather, to reach a similar conclusion based on his reading of Obama's book. My reading was more simply that Obama can't do a certain sort of writing all that well, a lot of telling us how he feels rather than showing it.
Blinded With Science
The fact that creationism is a position taken so seriously by erstwhile conservative intellectuals is something that it's worth reminding oneself of every now and again.
As I said the other day, lots of voters seem to be creationists and so it's no surprise to see some politicians pandering to them, but it's absurd for an institution like AEI which purports to be doing research and scholarship to be taking this business seriously.
Principals Unions
Steve Sailer's right: I've never heard of 'em and never would have guessed.
Week-Late Sopranos Blogging
I just finished last week's episode on the old DVR and, um, what? Show's been on the air for seasons after seasons after seasons and now with just a couple of episodes left before the end they suddenly introduce a major new Tony Soprano character trait? Like, was Tony a problem gambler two weeks ago? Last year? This is some sloppy, sloppy stuff; especially considering how long a hiatus they took to plot out these final episodes.
Sarkozy Wins
Sorry to ruin the suspense for those of you hoping to watch the results on Tivo, but it looks like Sarkozy's beaten Royale as expected to become President of France. News accounts keep indicating that a Sarkozy win heralds big changes but, frankly, I'm pretty skeptical. Sarkozy winning represents . . . the incumbent party staying in power. Yes, Sarkozy had a falling out with Jacques Chirac, but my strong recollection from when that happened was that it was more a personal rivalries kind of thing than a major disagreement over policy.
Obviously, I'm not an expert, but even though the Times says his win "was also a triumph of a platform proposing far-reaching changes for Europe’s third-largest economy over one stressing the need to preserve the country’s welfare state" it's hard to see. This platform sees notable mostly for its platitudinal quality: "conquer unemployment," "schools that guarantee success for all children" -- sure, sounds good to me. We'll see, I guess.
May 7, 2007
More Sarko
Continuing on the Sarkozy theme what, exactly, is supposed to be the significance of the man's alleged "pro-American" views? The way my colleague Andrew Sullivan put it is that "Sarko is not a visceral anti-American, unlike many of his peers" and "In that sense, we have gained a new and stronger ally in the war against Islamism." Now my recollection of events is that the whole idea that Europe in general and France in particular was full of "visceral anti-Americans" is that many European governments and the vast majority of European citizens took the view that an invasion and occupation of Iraq was unlikely to produce beneficial results.
In that opinion they were, of course, vindicated.
So what is it that we think Sarkozy will do -- follow the United States blindly into a new war? It seems not. Sarkozy addressed France's American friends by saying "I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need her, but that friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently." And, of course, under Jacques Chirac's presidency France did cooperate with the United States in Afghanistan and has cooperated with us broadly on intelligence-sharing and counter-terrorism. So what's the difference supposed to be?
Responsibility: Flowing Down Hill
You know how on TV cops arrest someone low-level then prosecutors try to flip him to convict the higher-ups? Jim Henley notices that when it comes to military investigators looking into misconduct in Iraq things go the other way 'round.
Richardson on Blog Talk Radio
Those of you curious about the Democratic field's one-man second tier may want to check out Bill Richardson's appearance on blog talk radio today at 1PM Eastern Time where he'll be talking to James and Nate from Heading Left.
Zawahiri Backs Bush
Bush and al-Qaeda sitting in the tree:
“This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap,” al-Zawahri said, according to a transcript released by the monitoring group SITE. The bill is evidence of American “failure and frustration,” he added.
“We ask Allah that they (U.S. troops) only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed, in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson,” he said.
For the sake of intellectual honesty and consistency, let's note that one can conclude nothing whatsoever from the mere fact that Zawahiri is saying this. Mass murderers are also known to lie and even to make analytical errors. That Zawahiri says he wants us to stay is not, as such, a reason to leave any more than Zawahiri saying the reverse would be a reason to stay. Nevertheless, the reality is that Zawahiri's stated analysis makes sense. The US troop presence in Iraq is enormously costly to the United States in a whole bunch of ways, and it's a "good issue" for al-Qaeda; one that presents a fundamentally favorable context in which for al-Qaeda to attack Americans.
Well-Put
A nice Los Angeles Times editorial unendorses the surge in Iraq, and makes most of the points that need to be made about the futility of the continued American military presence in Iraq.
The New Atheism
Kevin Drum raised a good point the other day. There have long been atheists in the West, especially among the intellentsia, but lately there seem to be an awful lot of what you might call evangelizing atheists who want to publish books about how awful religion is. Kevin names Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens and I was also add Daniel Dennett into the mix. What's going on?
It seems especially odd to me because it's so contrary to the spirit of non-theism to go around writing books like this. The whole strength of the non-theistic intellectual enterprise over the years has simply been to go about our business without talking about God. Talk about the origins of the universe. Talk about human history. Talk about ethics and politics. Talk about the nature of truth. Talk about the origin of species. And do it without talking about God. That's atheism -- just doing the intellectual work of explaining and debating things without reference to the supernatural -- not devising ever-more-intricate proofs that there is no God.
Beyond Economics
Over at Brad DeLong's site you can see a fascinating discussion of America's Russia policy in the 1990s between DeLong, Martin Wolf, and Lawrence Summers. One remark I would make is that to an extraordinary extent, all three participants are willing to accept the premise that the only goal of US policy toward Russia in the 1990s was a good-faith effort to induce Russian prosperity, with such efforts being hampered by political constraints, the objective difficulty of the task, and pure policy errors.
In the real world, though, this is clearly not the case. Foreign policymakers and presidents -- though perhaps not Treasury Department economists like Summers -- concern themselves with questions of power politics. A prosperous Russia was seen as good for the United States, but not nearly so good as a Russia that was disinclined to object too strenuously US policy at the UN Security Council and other regional fora and that was willing to concede to the United States an equal (or even greater than equal) share of influence in Russia's "near abroad." This is a big part of the story of the relatively uncritical backing the Clinton administration provided to Boris Yeltsin -- under his leadership, Russia didn't attempt to assert itself on the world stage the way that Vladimir Putin, bolstered by oil revenue -- has, and we wanted to keep it that way.
Naturally, this dynamic also tends to undercut political support for reforms. In a country like Poland that doesn't see itself as a potential geopolitical rival to the United States and that sees (distant) American power as a useful check on nearby Russian and German power, people are willing to accept the idea that American advisors are really there to help. Russians, though, had seen their country locked in a decades-long battle for supremacy with the United States. Now Americans show up, pushing economic reforms, and those who feel that the reforms have made them worse off naturally wonder if the Americans aren't deliberately trying to make Russia weak and poor.
"New Ideas"
A terrible Washington Post article criticizes John Edwards' anti-poverty agenda on the grounds that "Critics Say He Brings Few Fresh Ideas to Signature Issue." Well, um, okay. But as Jared Bernstein argues, the virtue of Edwards' plan isn't that it's fresh it's that it's a good plan. No, Edwards hasn't uncovered the Magical New Idea To End Poverty -- rather he's assembled some old-but-not-implemented good ideas, is pushing for increased efforts on some old-and-effective ideas, etc., all in recognition of the fact that despite some difficulties the country has consistently shown itself capable of significantly reducing poverty whenever we're really cared to try.
Recall Jon Chait's "case against new ideas" in this context. What liberals need to do on poverty is win an election in a manner that provides some kind of plausible mandate for implementing anti-poverty policies, and then implement some good policies -- not necessarily the freshest ones -- and Edwards represents the best shot at that we've seen in decades.
Kagan on Obama Continued
One of Andrew Sullivan's readers catches Bob Kagan playing a bit fast and loose with Obama's speech. The best part is this. Obama concludes his thoughts on nuclear proliferation thusly:
Finally, if we want the world to deemphasize the role of nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia must lead by example. President Bush once said, “The United States should remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status – another unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation.” Six years later, President Bush has not acted on this promise. I will. We cannot and should not accept the threat of accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch. We can maintain a strong nuclear deterrent to protect our security without rushing to produce a new generation of warheads.
From this, Kagan gleans merely that Obama "talks about . . . maintaining 'a strong nuclear deterrent.'" Which, of course, he does talk about -- in the context of cutting the nuclear weapons budget and restoring reciprocity to the global nonproliferation bargain. The proliferation stuff was the best part of the speech -- an area where rhetorical rubber hit the road and he came down on the right side. I genuinely wonder why Kagan thinks it's a good idea to portray Obama as being on his side on nuclear issues when he isn't -- I don't really buy the notion that it's all part of some conspiracy to discredit him with Democratic voters.
Progress
Huh. I never would have imagined that Ron Wyden's health care reform package would actually find some Republican cosponsors, but there you have it -- Bob Bennett in the Senate and Jo Ann Emerson in the House. Good for him.
This comes via Max Sawicky. I'm not super-enthusiastic about this plan on the merits (see Joe Klein for enthusiasm) but if Wyden can actually secure moderate Republican votes for this bill it's certainly a compromise I would accept. For the moment, though, I think it's best to focus on expanding the debate and noting that considerably more radical steps than the Wyden plan (which leaves us with a large role for quasi-competing private insurance firms) contemplates would bring substantial benefits. I think one can realistically envision something like John Edwards' plan getting proposed, picking up some steam, and then getting watered down into something more like Wyden's proposal in order to pass and that wouldn't be a bad thing for the country.
Biden And The "War on Terror"
Ben Smith points out that Joe Biden's been waging war on the "war on terror" usage for some time now.
The Unpopularity of Mitt Romney
It's been argued to me that the unpopularity of Mitt Romney is stemming from his comparatively low name recognition. I'm prepared to give that some credence, but it's worth diving into the data. For one thing, the questions do specify partisan affiliations, so even if you have no idea who Mitt Romney is you've still got something to base your choice off of.
So it seems noteworthy that asking "Do you lead more toward Edwards, the Democrat; or Romney, the Republican?" -- this is Romney's worst matchup -- inspires fully 25 percent of self-identified Republicans to declare for "Edwards, the Democrat" on route to a shocking 61-27 route. You would think that the number of die-hard "I'll vote GOP no matter what" Republicans would be higher than 27 percent. Even in Romney's worst matchup, Hillary Clinton is getting 54 percent of the vote, which is outstanding considering how high her negatives are.
Silence is Golden
Mark Cuban seems to have curiously little to say about Dallas' first round meltdown against Golden State.
Counterintuiting Suns-Spurs
As everyone knows, Phoenix versus San Antonio isn't just a playoff contest, it's a grand clash of visions. The Spurs, led by "The Big Fundamental" epitomize the ethic of Playing the Right Way that's beloved by cranky old men but not so much by fans. The run-and-gun Suns, by contrast, are an aesthetic pleasure but, perhaps, Not Built for the Playoffs.
Far be it from me to actually disagree with this characterization, whose basis is clear enough to anyone who follows the NBA, but one wrinkle does strike me as missing from this narrative. Steve Nash, the Phoenix leader, is a quintessential Play The Right Way point guard -- pass-first guy whose scoring game is dominated by the traditional Play The Right Way skill of accurate jump (and free throw) shooting. San Antonio, by contrast, has Tony Parker as its floor general. A small, quick shoot-first point guard who relies on penetration to score. He's a classic Play The Wrong Way player. So how can he be running the offense for the quintessential Play The Right Way team?
Berman on Penn
Ach! Now that I'm being paid to blog, I'm so busy writing blog posts that I don't have time to read Ari Berman's article on Mark Penn in The Nation and blog about it in a timely manner. Ari's a friend and I know we both don't like Mark Penn, though, so it's almost certainly good.
(More substantive remarks TK)
La France Multiculty
New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz says three things will change now that Sarkozy is President of France:
The third will be the initial experiment among the western powers in dethroning the cult of multiculturalism. Majorities have a right--even an obligation--to preserve their own ethics, norms, cultures and histories. They have a right to define the qualifications for membership in and even admission to their societies. This will be the struggle of the 21st century. And not just in France.
Obviously, Marty doesn't like Arabs and Sarkozy's given some indication that he feels the same way, but does he really think France of all places is in the grips of the "cult of multiculturalism"? France has probably the least multiculturalist, most assimilation-uber-alles policies of any democracy featuring a large immigrant population. The trouble in France is that their demands for integration . . . aren't working, not that they aren't being made. Indeed, Sarkozy has proposed that France adopt something like American-style affirmative action.
Tonight's Predictions
I don't for a minute believe that the Detroit-Chicago margin is as big as it appeared to be during Game 1, but Detroit is still a somewhat better team playing at home against an inexperienced Bulls squad so I expect them to win, but anticipate Chicago will make it respectable. In the West, well, what can you say? Utah was so bad down the stretch and Golden State so good that John Hollinger, after doing a little specification-searching to correctly "predict" the first round results now thinks the Warriors will win.
But, of course, Utah looked fine playing against Houston. And this matchup seems terrible for Golden State. The Warriors have no answer for Carlos Boozer, and on the flipside Deron Williams has reasonable size against Baron Davis and Utah has the frontcourt depth to just keep smacking him around all series. Last but not least, I don't see Jerry Sloan getting rattled.
Meet The New Boss
New American Prospect website now live. Many Bothans died to bring you this superior method of displaying information. I believe the Atlantic will have a new page some day pretty soon, but these things are difficult to organize properly.
Jihad TV
This rather shocking series of Hamas indoctrination videos comes to us via Sullivan and Weigel.
Sara tells me that children young enough to be appropriate targets for the mouse character and the pastel colors normally aren't capable of following segments this long or this sort of conceptual vocabulary, for whatever it's worth.
May 8, 2007
Jazz-Warriors
Whoa -- awesome!
I noted the other day that this is a terrible matchup from an NBA marketing perspective, but from a basketball perspective it looks to be absolutely fantastic. Which points us to perhaps the league's most annoying problem -- this tendency to market the matchups that are easiest to market (think Lakers versus Heat), rather than the ones that actually produce the best games. This seems to me like a classic example of short-term thinking, you see why people do it, but over time it erodes the credibility of your brand since your most-hyped games turn out to not necessarily be very good ones.
A different strategy would leave people primed to believe that if the league is hyping something enormously, that's because it's a quality matchup, and if you don't know much about it well, then, you should tune in and find out.
This is also, I think, relevant to the Democratic Party.
Romney's Seven Year Itch
Mitt Romney thinks that "In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up." The Washington Post just reports on this straight making no note of the fact that it's ridiculously false. Mark Kleiman remarks:
As embarrassed as Romney should be, the Washington Post should be more embarrassed. Doesn't saying something checkably — and hilariously — false count as gaffe? And shouldn't Romney now be asked to explain his remark? If the Post won't do it, everyone else should.
Kleiman's obviously forgotten the central fact here: It's not a gaffe because Romney's a Republican. Recall that this isn't the first time Romney's been shown with weird ideas about France -- a country where he's actually lived.
One of Us
Congratulations to Sommer who's joining the growing ranks of people working professionally in the lucrative blogging sector of the economy.
This sort of thing makes me sympathetic to KNZN's critique of Alan Blinder -- even if you think there will be a lot of outsourcing-related job displacement over the next twenty years, it doesn't really follow that all the job growth will be in non-outsourceable sectors.
Short and Sweet
I agree with Ross that an awful lot of television shows -- especially the better ones -- would benefit from defined cutoff dates. To me, though, the issue isn't so much that some shows (The Sopranos, say) have overstayed their welcome by staying on the air (metaphorically, in this case) too long. Rather, the point is simply that good storytelling requires planning. If a writer knows he has 36 episodes to fill, he can write a good 36 episode storyline divided into three 12 episode arcs. But if you don't know how much material you're supposed to produce, or if you wind up doing an unanticipated season just for the money you maybe come up with something not so good or stretching your material too thin.
The View From Your Breakfast
"From famous place called Cafe du Monde. Fried pastry with powdered sugar, usually served with Cafe Au Lait. I went with Iced Cafe Au Lait."
UPDATE: To be clear, I'm not in New Orleans, this is from one of my far-flung correspondents. The way this is supposed to work, you, the reading public, take pictures of breakfast (or merely locate old ones) and either send me a JPEG file or a link to a Flickr page or something similar.
Storm Clouds
Spencer Ackerman reviews George Tenet's At the Center of the Storm: My Years In the CIA. He's not impressed! "Like much else in the book, Tenet's focus on the "slam dunk" quote is actually sneaky -- he serves to obscure the real issue at hand while oscillating between contrition and a fiery, if dubious, defense of his tenure." On the other hand, Tenet turns out to have a good eye for an NCAA basketball rivalry.
Evite
Who decided to radically redesign Evite's, um, evites and make them all terrible? Did Facebook plant a mole inside the organization somehow? This is catastrophic.
Memories...
Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen is feeling nostalgic for HillaryCare. Which is probably as it should be. Liberal politicians have largely moved on to ideas I like more and that I would expect libertarian economists to like less.
That being the case, though, the onus to try to make something like the Clinton Plan work properly belongs on right-of-center politicians not "all those smart Democrats" they "put in a room" way back when. We've seen in Massachusetts and California that when Republican politicians and the business community decide they want to come together to try and pre-empt more fundamental reforms, liberals -- quite rightly -- tend not to stand in their way.
After GWOT, What?
Al says, "The problem always has been: what do you replace GWOT with? Rumsfeld tried to change it to GSAVE, which is probably a better phrase. I think Matthew mocked him for it."
I disagree. The difficulty with finding an apt replacemen for GWOT highlights the inaptness of the term. The reason nobody can come up with a good name for the thing "GWOT" is supposed to denote is that it doesn't denote anything. Instead, insofar is it isn't merely a piece of goofy rhetoric (and I think John Edwards went a bit too far in suggesting this is all it is) it's a conceptual confusion -- an effort to lump together a bunch of loosely-related issues that 9/11 all happened to highlight and turn them into a single "thing" even though there's nothing there.
To take an example, a lot of critiques of "GWOT" begin by noting that "terrorism is a tactic, and you don't go to war with a tactic." Which is true. At the same time, while on the one hand 9/11 highlighted a specific problem with a specific enemy, it also did highlight America's vulnerability to the generic tactic of terrorism. Something like "we should harden cockpit doors" isn't part of a "war on Islamic fundamentalism" (or whatever more precise term you might like) it's a counterterrorism measure just like the longstanding practice of using metal detectors is.
So there's a specific al-Qaeda issue (we're not going to invest tons of effort into crushing ETA). Then there's a general terrorism issue (we do want to reduce our generic vulnerability from any group that may arise in the future). Then there are the geopolitics of the Middle East. Then there's the issue of nuclear proliferation. These questions are relate, but there's not a single thing that should have a single name. There's fighting al-Qaeda, there's counterterrorism, there's the Middle East, there's non-proliferation -- those are all good words. "War on Terror" should just be demoted to the status of somewhat silly name for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
Penn Again
Okay, this time I've actually read Ari's article -- it's a great execution of an article about Mark Penn's evident conflicts of interests and ties to corporate malefactors. It's a genuinely bizarre situation, right down to the fact that Penn isn't even on leave from his job as Worldwide President & CEO of Burson Marsteller. It's one thing to be recruiting people from the corporate world, but Penn is right now both advising Clinton and the CEO of a firm being bad vast sums of money to do PR for all kinds of corporations.
What Ari doesn't get into is whether, all that notwithstanding, Penn is just such a brilliant pollster that we should all be thrilled to have someone of his stature working for a leading Democrat. I would say "no." It doesn't take much of a genius to reach the conclusion that ceteris paribus candidates from left-of-center political parties can become more popular by being less left-wing, and Penn seems to have no particular sense of when this might be a bad idea. He also seems unusually averse to "big ideas" and ambition even for a pollster, which is saying something.
Relief
These sort of concerns about National Guard units being too tied up in foreign deployments to do state-oriented disaster relief and so forth constitute the best rationale I can think of for the belief that the Army needs to get bigger. One could use a larger regular Army in order to curtail the need to call on Guard units and thereby increase domestic disaster preparedness. On balance, though, that would have to be an incredibly cost-ineffective means of addressing natural disasters, so I don't see the argument carrying the day on the merits.
Has John Edwards specifically come out against the larger military? Obama and Clinton are for it, and Kerry/Edwards endorsed a version of this idea back in 2004.
Obama Does Detroit
Brad Plumer: "The knock against Obama is that he often shies away from confrontation, but yesterday he did waltz into a room full of Detroit businessmen and lecture them about the need for stricter fuel-economy standards. (The speech itself was pretty harsh, and he didn't exactly draw applause with lines like this: "Even as [automakers] shed thousands of jobs... over the last few years, they've continued to reward failure with lucrative bonuses for CEOs.")
Good for him. The US auto companies are sort of sitting ducks for criticism at this point, but the car industry is probably the toughest one for a Democrat to take on thanks to the UAW and the general swinginess of Michigan.
You And What Recruiting Pool?
Via Ramesh Ponnuru, I see that Rudy Giuliani is joining Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton in calling for a larger Army. One can't help but wonder where these troops are supposed to be conjured up from. The strongest thing coming through from Brian Mockenhaupt's article on basic training is that it's really hard to recruit an Army up to the current size.
That's not to say that the military isn't going to hit its goals. Clearly, they will. Already, though, they've stepped up recruitment bonuses enormously as well as relaxing standards for who they're allowed to recruit. Less quantifiably, the obvious upshot of Mockenhaupt's reporting is that at this point the message coming down to the people in charge of training new recruits is that at the margin they should worry more about losing soldiers than they should about passing on sub-par ones. The only really reliable way of increasing the recruiting pool would be to have a recession, and I hope that's not what these candidates have in mind.
Rudy's Army
Dave Weigel has a bit more on this.
Walls Cracking
Byron York's not much of a deviationist, so when he finds himself musing "should deadlines be off limits in the Iraq debate?" and concluding "Maybe at this point, a deadline for the Iraqi government wouldn't be a bad thing" I think you have to see some significance in that development. At long last some of the mainstream right is getting tired of this morass.
I Want My Barely Legal Porn!
Ah, search engines.
But really. My former colleague Garance Franke-Ruta had an op-ed calling for a ban on participation in pornography by people under the age of 21. As befits a man whose blog was once featured in Playboy's "Girls of the Pac Ten" issue (really!) I make the case for keeping barely legal porn legal over at Campus Progress.
Built Kerik Tough
Jon Chait takes a look at the continuing conservative love of "swagger" no matter how many inept, corrupt fools it winds up leading them to embrace.
Thank God
For years now, I've been plagued by an embarrassing affection for Avril Lavigne. Today, my problems are solved.
That sucks. The song sucks, the video sucks, Avril sucks. I hate it. I'm cured!
Now I just need to avoid the temptation to watch the "Complicated" video and get sucked back in.
May 9, 2007
Canada: Still Awesome
Msmackle writes in re: Avril Lavigne's latest: "Well, it at least follows your trend of Canadian-friendly music fetish. As a proud Canuck, I gotta say that I hope this anti-Avril move isn't part of a new trend away from the Great White North." It certainly isn't! Hence this semi-recent video of "Empty" by my favorite Canadian band, Metric:
For political purposes, however, one should really check out "Monster Hospital" or especially "Succexy".
You Get The Advice You Pay For
I'm afraid to need to be a Mark Penn defender, but I think Ezra's point here, while true, is also a bit unfair. Ezra accuses Penn-the-pollster as miraculously finding the exact same shape of public opinion in every single year -- Democrats must move to the right on economics. And, indeed, that does seem to be Penn's perennial conclusion. That said, finding the same result every time he goes out to do a survey doesn't, as best I can tell, differentiate Penn that much from other big-time political pollsters. Ideology shouldn't matter in the field of public opinion research but, in practice, given pollsters tend to give remarkably consistent advice year after year.
This is actually what makes the fact that Penn is working for Hillary Clinton so significant. Penn isn't the kind of advisor you hire because you wonder what advice he's going to give you. Rather, he's the kind of advisor you hire because you know perfectly well what advice he's going to give and you've decided that's the advice you want to get. Penn is hardly unique in this regard (many people have noted that 2004-vintage John Edwards sounds more like 2008-vintage Barack Obama than he does like 2008-vintage John Edwards and that David Axelrod worked for Edwards in '04 and Obama in '08) but that's just the point -- politicians aren't naive about this stuff, they pick strategists who are going to give congenial strategic advice.
Embedded Video Explains It All
I should note that this Avril Lavigne video came to my attention only because I was admiring the Obama campaign's embedded videos, wondered what service they were using, and then found myself on the very elegant Brightcove site where Avril's terrible video was featured content.
In contrast to Obama's super-classy yet obscure service, John Edwards is strictly a YouTube man, the populist choice for online video hosting.
More Porn-Blogging
In my riposte to GFR's advocacy of banning 18, 19, and 20 year-olds from participating in pornography, I wrote: "On the other hand, criminalizing participation in such activity would dramatically raise the stakes involved from mild embarrassment to actual legal penalties." Garance responds that she does not "support legal penalties against teenage participants" and notes that she covered this back on May 4.
More Friedman Units to Come
Jonathan Singer throws some much-needed skepticism on the notion that September will really mark a meaningful turning point away from the endless "six more months" dodging of the basic point that American policy in Iraq has failed. He notes, among other things, that there are 35,000 soldies from ten brigades scheduled to deploy to Iraq in August, in order to make it possible to sustain the "surge" through into 2008.
It's absolutely vital to keep in mind that since at least early 2004, a commencement of troop reductions in Iraq has been widely and repeatedly reported to be imminently in the offing. It keeps not happening and the best assumption is that it won't happen. Instead, the general trend is for the number of US troops in Iraq to go up. Barring a real sea change in the congressional Republican Party -- not just grumbling, you'd need to see a genuine structural shift in the power-relations inside the caucus -- this isn't going to change until someone else is sitting in the White House.
Yeltsin Again
I think Brad DeLong and I are talking about cross purposes with regard to Russia policy in the 1990s. I agree with him as to what the goal of America's policy should have been. In his earlier post, though, Brad was writing about why our policy didn't achieve those results and all I'm trying to say is that we should consider the possibility that we didn't achieve what Brad (and I) think we should have achieved because these weren't the actual policy goals the Clinton administration was pursuing.
They may well have been the Treasury Department's goals (it seems to me that economists generally have sound foreign policy views) but the Treasury Department doesn't ultimately set policy toward major countries like Russia.
The Real Porn Problem
So here I am, trying to illegally download a bunch of songs in my effort to create the Ultimate Nineties Alt-Rock Playlist featuring all your favorite mainstream rock radio hits from back in the day, and I'm looking around for Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy" and all I can find is . . . pornography.
YouTube, by contrast, won't host any porn, so it's simply to find the "Sex and Candy" music video, but the playlist needs MP3 files and Acquisition is useless.
UPDATE: Thanks, commenters! I've got it now. (Haha, just joking, obviously I would never download any illegal MP3 files. That's right, Mr. RIAA, the whole thing was just some of the irony the kids enjoy these days.)
A Galaxy of Czars
Remember the "war czar" fiasco? Steve Benen points out that appoint a czar is actually the Bush administration's approach to everything. We've had a food safety czar, a cybersecurity czar, an AIDS czar, a bird-flu czar, and that's not even an exhaustive list.
In The Cookie Jar
Hilarious. Tom Lee at DCist points out that newish DC mayor Adrian Fenty's school reform program appears to be substantially plagiarized from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system in North Carolina.
Market Failure
The Economist offers its usual mix of interesting reporting and bizarre editorial judgment in its coverage of Rupert Murdoch's efforts to buy The Wall Street Journal:
Inevitably, given Mr Murdoch's reputation as a hands-on proprietor, there are fears that he would undermine the editorial independence of the Wall Street Journal's news coverage. But he is certain to understand that excessive interference could tarnish the paper's brand, the value of which comes from having wealthy readers who value honest journalism.
I'm reaching for the right joke here. I mean, obviously the same free market that The Economist is counting on to keep The Wall Street Journal honest isn't forcing The Economist to make sense. What's more, if a publication started infusing its business-oriented news coverage with rightwing politics would an Economist writer even notice? And where was this honesty-inducing market discipline when the Journal started writing all those crazy editorials and doing it over and over again for years? I think the situation's pretty clear -- Murdoch owns a lot of media properties around the world and none of them are known for their staunch commitment to editorial independence.
Good Work, Tom!
So Thomas Friedman, as you may have heard, gets to write twice a week for The New York Times primarily on foreign policy. And for today's column he writes about how . . . Hezbollah is bad. Can't they give this job to someone else?
Hindsight
It's hard to avoid noticing that while Avery Johnson got slammed for deciding to go small in order to match up against Golden State, Mike D'Antoni's now being hailed for deciding to go big in order to match up against San Antonio. The difference, obviously, is that Dallas lost game one against the Warriors and Phoenix won game two against the Spurs. Still, it's clear that sports punditdom doesn't have much of a consistent line on this changing up question.
The loss aside, the Spurs basically accomplished what they needed to accomplish on the road. The Suns are very good, but San Antonio's a better team. Phoenix's home court advantage, to me, threw the outcome into doubt, but having split on the road San Antonio now has the upper hand.
New BHTV
Yglesias versus Drezner. This episode features what some might consider an inordinate quantity of blog-navel-gazing, but that's what Chait hath wrought.
Heh. Indeed.
Bill Donahue takes on Rudy Giuliani:
If helping pregnant women make choices is the supreme issue for Rudy Giuliani, then he should be able to document all the checks he’s written to support Crisis Pregnancy Centers—not just Planned Parenthood. If he can’t, it is logical to conclude that the only real choice he thinks is worthy of his money is the one which results in the death of innocent human beings. And that would make him a fraud.
Rudy v. Donahue is more-or-less the domestic politics equivalent of the Iran-Iraq War as far as I'm concerned; this is some delicious infighting. Not unrelatedly, K-Lo's onto a key question here: Is Giuliani a Catholic?
Congestion Tax for DC
Ben Adler likes the idea and so do I. That said, it's absolutely impossible to discuss transportation or planning issues in the Greater Washington area without pointing out that it would be a really, really good idea to facilitate higher-density construction in the District.
Paying for the High Prices
Speaking of density, Mickey Kaus concludes some speculations on the disparity between wealth inequality and consumption inequality in the United States with a thought about rising restaurant prices:
Discussion of the Day
Okay. What's worse -- when rightwingers come out and say that reducing tax rates will increase tax revenues relative to the baseline, or when they follow Cato's Daniel Mitchell in writing something clearly designed to make you think that's true while also cleverly not quite making the claim?
Character
Emily Bazelon argues for the political relevance of Rudy Giuliani's famous mistreatment of his second wife. Ross Douthat responds with, among other things, a hypocrisy allegation: "I seem to recall a few conservatives - okay, maybe all of them - making precisely this argument about Bill Clinton without very many liberals joining the chorus, and I'm sure that Bazelon's discovery of the character issue in Giuliani's case has nothing to do with his party affiliation."
But look, here, by the time the extent of Bill Clinton marital issues came to light in 1998, the man had been President of the United States for more than a few years, so it was hardly necessary to go searching around for hints and clues as to whether or not one would approve of his conduct in office. Indeed, my sense is that conservatives mostly regarded Clinton's misconduct in this regard as a kind of synecdoche (or maybe metonymy -- sorry, Mr. Glassman!) for an failed presidency. Most Americans, by contrast, viewed Clinton's presidency as reasonably successful and his conduct vis-a-vis his wife, children, and Monica Lewinsky therefore not-especially-relevant to their judgments.
Giuliani, by contrast, is trying to run for president on an extremely hazy policy platform, has almost no relevant experience in public office (much less than, say, John Edwards or Barack Obama) since his signature accomplishments on crime are almost totally outside of federal authority, and, indeed, is running a campaign based on entirely on his character attributes.
Even More Penn
More good stuff from Mark Schmitt on the Mark Penn issue. Schmitt makes the point that Penn combines his multitudinous conflicts of interest with a methodology that leaves him very free to come up with whatever result he wants to find: "Penn's choice of categories has little to do with the actual data and everything to do with his presumptions going in -- populism doesn't work, don't criticize corporations -- which in turn have a delightfully precise correspondence with the interests of the clients of the firm of which Penn is Worldwide President and CEO."
To bring this back to the point I made yesterday, I think the thing to remember here is that Hillary Clinton isn't a political naif and Penn's basic notion of the shape of American politics doesn't change year-to-year. One would only give him such a large role in one's campaign if one already wanted to run and govern in the sort of way that Penn would predictably suggest.
Good Work!
Bill Richardson does us all a favor and offers up a fun, original campaign ad (via Mike Crowley) that also happens to bring home the small point that he's wildly more experienced than the competition in this race. I should also note that his healthcare plan reflects my sense of the correct strategy on the issue.
I guess I understand why it's relatively rare for politicians to cut outside the box ads, but you'd see longshots like Richardson try it more often.
HRC's Inevitability?
Jim Henley makes the case. It involves reading a lot into a single bit of polling data, but I think it's fairly compelling. As with much in politics, though, a lot comes down to how the candidates respond under pressure as the lights start shining on them brighter.
May 10, 2007
Pro-Choice Rudy
It seems like the obvious Rudy Giuliani campaign startegy was to run as a proponent of overturning Roe v. Wade while remaining nominally pro-choice -- joining the Wittes/Rosen/Whomever camp. Instead, though, after a lot of flailing around it seems he's decided to forthrightly take up the doomed mantle of the pro-choice Republican and run as Pete Wilson redux or something. Ross says "it's not entirely out of the question, particularly in a frontloaded primary season where his weaker rivals may not have time to accept defeat, drop out, and allow the anti-Rudy vote to coalesce around a single candidate."
It sure seems out of the question to me. Maybe not if there was some substantial body of thinking that commitment to anti-choice views played a major role in the '06 defeat or something, but that's not really out there. John McCain and Mitt Romney should, in my opinion, be popping some champagne this morning.
Harman: Gitmo Must Go
I've traditionally been a Jane Harman skeptic, but she's sure right about this.
Money Talks
The idea that Hollywood money comes with no strings attached is a tempting one, especially to liberals, and there's even some truth to it. But still, one should recognize the limits of such thinking. It's not a coincidence, after all, that American copyright law is tilted so heavily in favor of major record labels and movie and television studios.
Populism and '92
Discussing the Clinton campaign, I think Ezra Klein erects too much of a dichotomy between populist and New Dem "sides" to Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. It was much more like a synthesis, a weaving of key New Dem concepts into traditional Democratic populism, then it was a question of sides. Certainly several of the key New Dem interventions in that year -- the Ricky Ray Rector incident, the original Sister Souljah moment -- were cultural populism to go alonside Clinton's economic populism.
What's more, at the end of the day Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it" and put poor black women to work was a very populist idea. Welfare reform mixes with the idea that if you work hard and play by the rules you shouldn't be poor to make a pretty seamless blend of cultural and economic populism, bounded together by a shared notion of the social value of work.
Well, Then, Do Something
I'd say the main takeaway from moderate congressional Republicans' big meeting at the White House is that most of these "moderate" Republicans are what you might prefer to call vulnerable Republicans. After all, if there was actually anything moderate about their opinions of Iraq they wouldn't have decided that 2002 was a good year for lockstep support of the Bush administration's Iraq policy that was well followed-up by offering lockstep support of the Bush administration's Iraq policy in 2003, after which 2004 turned out to be an ideal moment for lockstep support of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, much as 2005 was also a good year for lockstep support of the Bush administration's Iraq policy and, indeed, that in 2006 lockstep support of the Bush administration's Iraq policy was just what the doctor ordered.
Even today, the moderates aren't doing anything -- collaborating, say, with the less die-hard anti-war House Dems to pass a bill -- that will change America's Iraq policy. Instead, they're just putting up a big showy display, "telling the president that conditions needed to improve markedly by fall or more Republicans would desert him on the war." And in the fall, what will they do? And by then, do they really expect people to give them any credit for it?
Derek Fisher
A truly amazing story last night even for those of you who aren't NBA fans:
Rudy Takes All?
A good point from Petey:
Specifically, I know that Dem primaries are basically proportional. In other words, if you win 30% of every Dem primary, you'll end up with around 30% of Dem delegates.
But I have a vague impression that GOP delegate selection rules include Winner Take All primaries. Or in other words, you could win 30% of every GOP primary and end up with 50% of delegates.
Right. Democrats normally allocate delegates proportionally to all candidates who pass a 15 percent threshold, whereas Republicans work like the electoral college where if you win a plurality of the state's voters, you win the state. Thus, it's possible in principle to secure the nomination with a fairly small proportion of the total vote. That only works, of course, if more than one viable opponent stays in the race, but it could work.
Bye, Bye, Blair
British PM Tony Blair will step down on June 27. Here from the archives is Geoffrey Wheatcroft's big Blair profile in the June 2004 Atlantic.
I'll just return to my token stolen-from-my-grandfather point about Blair, namely that he was more significant in selling the Iraq War in the United States than is commonly recognized. Lots and lots of Democrats who would never in a million years have taken George W. Bush's word for it that there was this huge Iraqi WMD threat and a reasonable American military plan to take it out, were perfectly prepared to be convinced by the fact that Blair, who one would think had access to more detailed information than any of us sitting at home reading the newspaper. In retrospect, obviously, this turns out to have been a terrible heuristic, but I think it was one that influenced a lot of people at the time.
Galbraith on Trade
I had kind of thought that now that I've left the Prospect I should reposition to the center by writing more about how the trade-skepticism and talk about the need for labor and environmental standards may make for good politics but doesn't really make sense on the merits. But, then, bam, here's James Galbraith making just that argument in TAP, so I guess it's not a good repositioning device any more. But it's still true!
This links up nicely with this discussion of different approaches to trade from Will Marshall and Ed Gresser. Galbraith and I are adhering to what Marshall and Gresser call the "social democrat" position -- namely an open economy with a strong welfare state -- as against "populist" trade skepticism and the DLC's "progressive modernizers" approach which as best I can from their description is focused on . . . doing what big business wants and then hoping for the best.
90s Nostalgia Blogging
One of the very best things about Nineties Alt Rock is that it featured one band called The Verve and another band called The Verve Pipe. This is one is the Verve:
I remember distinctly a period in my life when I thought that guy walking down the street bumping into everyone was the awesomest thing ever.
Is There A Historian In the House?
Here's an issue that's relevant to persistent demands that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton present more details about a health care plan during the campaign. Implicit in the pro-details side of things seems to be a kind of mandate literalism about the American legislative process. The idea is that if a candidate has a proposal on the table, runs on the proposal, gets attacked on the proposal, and then wins the election anyway that this makes it much more likely that congress will actually pass the proposal.
That makes a ton of logical sense. But is it historically accurate? Bush's tax cut proposals were put before the voters in 2000 and rejected by a clear majority and they passed anyway. FDR, by contrast, didn't campaign on anything resembling the New Deal he actually implemented. I have to plead ignorance about the 1964 campaign -- did Lyndon Johnson provide a detailed vision of Medicare and Medicaid before the election?
UPDATE: Some evidence. Time's coverage in 1964 foresaw something like Medicare as a result of Democratic victory, though it was very vaguely described, and doesn't envision Medicaid.
Team Obama
As Andrew Golis puts it, Bloomberg offers a present for Sally Quinn in the form of a fairly detailed profile of Barack Obama's economic advisors. The results turn out to be pretty uninteresting -- it's a bunch of well-regarded moderately progressive types -- except for the fact that Jeffrey Liebman has flirted with Social Security privatization.
In short, it seems that an Obama presidency would pursue a similar economic policy to a Hillary Clinton administration, though it would certainly be worth everyone while to pin Obama down on privatizing Social Security.
The Last, The Very Last
The final exchange about Jon Chait and the netroots, featuing Ezra Klein, Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, Rick Perlstein, and Jon himself is now up on the TNR website.
Withholding
Murray Waas: "The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove's, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas." These emails, according to Waas, "were made available to National Journal by a senior executive branch official, who said that the administration has inappropriately kept many of them from Congress."
May 11, 2007
Sir Charles Speaks
Isaac Chotiner has a fairly awesome interview with Charles Barkley, touching a wide range of subjects including his views on the 2008 race, his dislike of Al Sharpton, and the need for employer sanctions as the key to immigration policy.
Obama and Social Security
In re: the question of Barack Obama and Social Security privatization, the debate over the Bush privatization plan was, of course, one of the major events of Obama's relatively short tenure in the Senate and he was a consistent opponent of it at the time. I'm reliably informed that The Audicity of Hope also discusses and rejects privatization, though I must admit that I haven't actually read the book.
Missing Pau-er?
Okay, well, after losing at home to Detroit I'm getting more open to the idea that the Bulls screwed up by not making the a deal for Pau Gasol. That said, even in this loss, Luol Deng who they would have had to give up, did play really well. How much better would Gasol really have done than 21 points, 14 rebounds, and two blocks?
Delicate Flowers
I was at a big old get together yesterday evening featuring some people from the blogosphere, some old media types, folks with old media origins who now do some new media work, folks with new media origins who now work for MSM outlets, and even some people who aren't journalists or bloggers at all but who are familiar with these issues. The fascinating thing is that if you had to sort the group out into an "excited about new stuff" group and a "frightened by new stuff" group, the defining characteristic of the Axis of Fear is what strikes me as a fairly bizarre aversion to be criticized. Or, at a minimum, an aversion to being criticized in strong, blunt terms rather than a kind of polite disagreement between close friends or collaborators.
The way they would put it, naturally, is that they're only opposed to unfair or vulgar criticism. And that's probably even right -- nobody minds a fair, respectful criticism too much. But, of course, if you get criticized a lot -- as anyone with a moderately trafficked blog does -- most of the criticism is going to seem somewhat unfair to you. Opening yourself up to being criticized in unfair or obscene ways is part-and-parcel of the process of opening yourself up to being criticized at all; if you're not willing to read the occassional unfair or ill-informed slam, then you're really just not willing to go through the process of reading criticisms at all.
On top of that, there seems to be this notion that if there was no internet, nobody would be making the criticisms. As if before 1998 or so everyone sat around reading their morning New York Times with nary a peep of complaint. But of course people were always pissed off -- I remember Teenage Political Dork Matt and his father bitching about the media -- it's just that now you see hear from them more often. But if people are going to be pissed off at me, frankly, I'd rather have some sense of what they're pissed off about. Maybe they have good points and I should change things up. Or maybe their points are dumb, and I should press forward and ignore them.
Confessions of a Former Beer Snob
I agree with Daniel Davies. Budweiser is great. I used to drink fancy beers. Indeed, I still drink a fancy hefeweizen now and again. But a Bud is a solid choice and most microbrew stuff is crap. I was recently told, though, that the Miller family of beers are union-made and I should drink them instead.
Off The Table
Ray Takeyh makes the case for taking threats of unilateral military force off the table in The Boston Globe. I agree.
Middle East Progress
A new initiative from the Center for American Progress. They say:
Middle East Progress helps develop and highlight practical approaches to and voices involved in managing — and resolving — the Arab-Israeli conflict, with a primary focus on achieving a sustainable, secure, democratic Palestinian state alongside sustainable, secure, and democratic Israel. We believe such action will improve U.S., Israeli, and regional security, and America’s global standing, and reflects the will and aspirations of a vast majority of Israelis and Arabs living the conflict every day.
I say: Good for CAP. If I have one major criticism of their organization it's that it's struck me as unduly reluctant to take on issues that provoke serious disagreement within the Democratic Party camp, with things related to Israel and things related to trade being noteworthy examples. Those kind of issues, however, are exactly the ones where the world needs more think tanking to be done.
"Well-Chisled Clavicles"
The latest fashion must-have. I'll admit that I didn't even know what a clavicle was. I think I'd had it confused with a clavier, as in Wallace Stevens' "Peter Quince at the Clavier".
Union Beer
Key labor sources are telling me that Budweiser, like MIller, is union-made as are, in general, all the non-Coors mass market American beers.
Another Memo for Sally Quinn
Meet Barack Obama's foreign policy people -- they're good people. They also might have added Dan Shapiro to the list.
Strange Days
You know, I never would have guessed that my New York Post debut was going to be a favorable citation in a John Podhoretz column.
Uh-Oh
I have this longstanding, but also fairly obvious, joke about how someday soon all of us working in this here game are going to be replaced by low-wage Bangladeshi pundits. Now, at last, that day seems to be inching closer as the Pasadena Now web site apparently posted an ad saying "We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA."
This does strike me as somewhat weird since local news reporting would seem to be less outsourceable than many other forms of journalism. For punditry and so forth, it does help to be here in The Nation's Capital, but it's really not all that helpful. Most of any pundit's information comes from reading the newspaper and the newspapers are all online and readable from India or wherever.
What Is The Post Opinion Section For?
One specific issue some of the delicate flowers raised was the question of why progressive bloggers are so mean to Fred Hiatt. And, indeed, a decent point was raised: Progressive bloggers are quick to impute specific motives to Hiatt and we're often leaping to conclusions -- and even frequently mistaken -- when we do so. The truth of the matter is that none of us know why the Post does the things it does; their actions are baffling. Today, for example, I see an op-ed by Richard Perle.
What is one to conclude from this?
Does the Post think Perle is a reliable source of information? Maybe it does, but in that case one would need to seriously question its sanity. My guess is that the Post doesn't think Perle is a reliable source of information, but that it decided to publish the op-ed anyway. Why would they do that? I'm not sure. I could speculate, but I won't since, as I've learned, that sort of thing annoys people. One is left, however, with the basic facts -- Perle's op-ed is there in the opinion section. There's also a column by