Last Nineties Nostalgia Blog
Party's over, it's past 4:30 in the AM, and it's really time to go to bed. Still, one last nineties video:
It's a bit hammy, but I think this is my favorite video of the decade. Either that or NIN's "Closer."
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May 20, 2007 - May 26, 2007 Archives
May 20, 2007
The Pakistan Dilemma
The Bush administration has screwed a lot of stuff up through malice, mendacity, or just plain incompetence. On a question like Pakistan, though, I think you do need to concede that the issue is genuinely difficult. On the other hand, years after 9/11 I think it's clear that what we're doing isn't working: "The United States is continuing to make large payments of roughly $1 billion a year to Pakistan for what it calls reimbursements to the country’s military for conducting counterterrorism efforts along the border with Afghanistan, even though Pakistan’s president decided eight months ago to slash patrols through the area where Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are most active."
For a long time, though, I agreed with people who thought there was no real alternative to propping up Musharraf and sort of hoping for the best. This Blake Hounshell article from a while back convinced me that was wrong.
Muqtada's Shift
Muqtada al-Sadr goes in for a little political repositioning, "reaching out to a broad array of Sunni leaders" and distancing itself from the US-backed, Shiite-led Iraqi government that it once supported. Sadr's swung back and forth on this kind of thing, so I don't think it need be seen as reflecting any true change of heart. Still, he seems like a pretty canny politician who has a better grasp than most Americans on the state of Iraqi public opinion.
Thus, when he has his minions saying things like "We want to aim the guns against the occupation and al-Qaeda, not between Iraqis" I think that's a sound indication that this is the political sweet spot in Iraq. That, in turn, is just another indication that if we leave Iraq, there'll be nothing left for Iraqis to do but turn on al-Qaeda; it's only the fact of the occupation that prevents the objective unpopularity of al-Qaeda from becoming the most salient thing.
Reporting-Esque RUMINT
It's been indicated to me that John Edwards' forthcoming speech at the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday will substantially assuage my concerns about his national security vision.
Ah, Compromise
Thinking more about immigration policy, Mark Krikorian outlines the sort of compromise he'd think about:
But if they wanted a genuine compromise that would lead to amnesty, they needed to pair it with an end to future mass immigration — not just (theortically) re-orienting a portion of the family visas at some distant point in the future, but abolishing them now, along with deep cuts in employment-based and refugee immigration as well.
This sort of thing, I think, is what makes compromise so hard to come by. It's genuinely ridiculous, in my opinion, that we accept the level of illegal immigration that we have right now. It's ridiculous, rather than just plain bad, because it seems we could put a stop to it fairly easily. The basic shape of a crackdown-plus-amnesty compromise makes a ton of sense. The restrictionist view that implementation of an amnesty should be conditional on some evidence that the cracking down is having an impact makes sense. And with that framework in place, we could then allow for the level of immigration to the United States to be set by law in a manner of our choosing.
At this point, though, efforts at compromise totally break down. Mark Krikorian is upset about high levels of illegal immigration because he's upset about high levels of immigration. He's afraid of the looming Hispanic Pizza Menace. I, on other hand, have no such concerns. It seems undesirable to me to have large numbers of people living and working in the country illegally, but I have no problem with large numbers of people coming here from around the world to live and work. If I were dictator, we would step up enforcement, then have an amnesty, then raise the levels of legal immigration. Compromise efforts, however, keep trying blur the lines between people who want to reduce illegal immigration as part of an effort to reduce the number of foreign-born people in the United States, and people who want to reduce illegal immigration as part of an effort to reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the country, people whose status has become a large moral and practical problem.
It's hard, however, to see legislation that could actually embody those goals -- they're too much in conflict.
Selling Out
In re: the great selling out debate, I think it's noteworthy that the concept of "selling out" seems to implicate several different kinds of activities that should probably be separated.
Demand-Side Solutions
An interesting article details efforts by some college administrators to sabotage the US News and World Report rankings by getting enough schools to agree to decline to provide the information they're asked for. It's a good idea. TheUS News rankings are a terrible farce and killing them off would be a good thing. This even seems like a reasonable tactic.
All that said, the very best way to deal a death-blow to this scheme would be for America's colleges and universities to work together and with third parties to try to come up with some meaningful metrics for higher education performance. All magazines make lists, but the reason the college rankings are such a hit is that there's nothing out there. Ordinal rankings are inherently kind of dumb, but higher education leaders both can and should come up with some kind of theory about what service they're providing to students and some method of measuring how well they're doing it. Since the schools don't do anything like this themselves, and since their lobbyists are wildly opposed to having the government do it, the upshot has been to outsource the function to a struggling newsmagazine that deploys screwy formulae to boost sales.
If the higher education community itself provided some kind of better product, then university presidents wouldn't find themselves under US News' thumb.
Best. Counterargument. Ever.
White House defending Al Gonzalez against no confidence motion by describing no confidence motions as un-American.
Life in the Hood
The ace crime reporting team of Ackerman and Yglesias utterly fail to figure out who fired all those shots right by our house.
Conference Championships
This year's two conference championship matchups both seem so lopsided that I forgot to even post my picks before the first game was played. Suffice it to say that I like, I think, almost everyone on the planet, expect to see the Spurs facing (and in all likelihood beating) the Pistons in the NBA Finals. It's really too bad, since we've had some great playoff series thus far, but the current round looks certain to be a dreary momentum-killer. I can't recall both series being this one sided in quite a while.
May 21, 2007
Zombie Commission
After five or six months of wasting time (and God knows how many lives) with the "surge," it looks like the Bush administration may be reconsidering the Iraq Study Group. You'd think the people working in this White House would just be too embarrassed to wake up some mornings.
Vouchers in DC
Given the shoddy state of the DC public schools, I think it's perfectly understandable why a lot of people are inclined to turn to vouchers as a remedy. What's more, as Fred Hiatt points out, the voucher pilot program in DC, much like other voucher programs in inner-city areas, is good at doing what markets do best -- delivering consumer satisfaction. As Hiatt's column points out, parents with kids in the program are generally much happier than parents with kids not in the program, and there are many more applicants for "Opportunity Scholarships" than there are scholarships to hand out.
One thing missing from Hiatt's long, entirely laudatory, article about DC vouchers, however, is any evidence that educational outcomes are improving as a result. That seems, however, like an important point! According to the article, "preliminary results" from the efforts to compare attainment by kids who won the raffle to that of eligible kids whose parents applied for the raffle and lost "are expected later this spring." Can't we wait until that's out until we start writing the columns about what a success this has been?
The Party of Teen Pregnancy
Efforts to restore public funding for birth control services in Missouri shot down with the support of pro-life groups. As Neil says, this kind of things makes it difficult to believe that pro-life groups are centrally motivated by the putative wrongness of abortion rather than by a general desire for more intense regulation of sexual activity. Which, really, shouldn't be very controversial since it's clearly what pro-life groups themselves say.
Evidence
If you, like me, kind of had this sense that liberals were dominating the internet here's the actual evidence. I think it's possible to over-read this trend. The Bush years generally, and the 2003-2006 period in particular, naturally gave liberals more to complain about. And this came at a period when conservatives utterly owned the radio and were predominant in television punditry as well. So it's naturally that the internet void filled up with what was around to do the filling -- lots of liberal energy, relatively little from the right.
In one sense, though, the web really is better suited to progressives. The big difference between the progressive political coalition in American and the conservative one is that the members of the progressive coalition have much less in common with each other than do the members of the conservative coalition. The web, where the general idea is to narrowcast, is just a better fit for an assortment of demographic groups that tends to be pretty miscellaneous in terms of anything other than voting for Democrats.
Iraqi Civil War: Now With Better Drive Shafts
David Ignatius reaches a truly bizarre conclusion about Iraq:
This U.S. training mission in Iraq was the heart of the Baker-Hamilton report's recommendation last December. And it still seems to me the right way forward. American troops cannot stop a civil war in Iraq, but they can teach soldiers how to fix drive shafts, maintain engines and order spare parts. That's a basic mission that Congress should reaffirm, even as it questions the surge of more U.S. troops into Baghdad. Time is the strategic resource now; Congress and the administration need to agree on ways to add some minutes to the clock.
This is a kind of awesomely topsy-turvey inversion of the dictum that war is politics by other means. Here, somehow, the political objectives can be screwed up and military objectives can be non-existent and somehow that can all be made allright if only we really, really nail down the logistics. But whether or not it's a good thing for any given group of soldiers to know how "to fix drive shafts, maintain engines and order spare parts" (or anything else) is entirely dependent on the political issues. The Iraqi Army circa 1990 was, despite its problems, much more functional than the 2006-vintage Iraqi Army and, indeed, was an unusually high-functioning military organization for the Arab world. But guess what? We turned out to be fighting against it and even later it was an instrument of Saddam Hussein's will, used to crush Kurds and Shi'a insurgents.
Better training of Iraqi troops, in short, might be a good idea if it were a means of resolving Iraq's political problems. But Ignatius doesn't think it is. He thinks we "cannot stop a civil war in Iraq." But so why do we want these highly trained Iraqi soldiers running around? What's that supposed to accomplish?
Why Compromise?
So if business groups aren't going to support the immigration compromise plan, then why not scrap this guest worker business? That seems like a point which both pro-immigration liberals and anti-immigration conservatives ought to be able to agree on. The guest workers were clearly in there as a sop to business lobbyists, but if they don't like their sop, then let's take it out. It's a terrible idea.
I Can't Even Think of An Appropriate Joke
Haaretz reports that "The Bush administration has given Israel permission to discuss the future of the Golan Heights, security arrangements and Israeli-Syrian peace accords if it agrees to talks with Syria." But Nancy Pelosi's a traitor -- dhimmitude! That said, if I were an Israeli and I woke up to read in my morning paper (though my understanding is that few actual Israelis read Haaretz) that my government was getting "permission" from the United States to conduct diplomacy with an adjacent country I might worry that something had gone awry in the US-Israeli special friendship.
Like the people driving the relationship, and policy to the region generally, are bloodthirsty and crazy, with no actual idea about how to advance American or Israeli interests.
Sturgeon's Law
In debates about the "new media" in general and blogs in particular, I've often found myself reaching for an economical way to express the point that, yes, naturally, most blog posts aren't very enlightening but that's just because most stuff sucks and has nothing to do with blogs per se. Mark Kleiman tells me this is Sturgeon's Law:
All of this reminds me of Sturgeon's Law, named for the great SF writer Theodore Sturgeon, who was supposedly accosted at a Greenwich Village literary party by someone who said to him (I'm quoting from memory), "Sturgeon, how can you stand to publish in those science fiction magazines? Ninety-five percent of the stuff in them is crap." To which Sturgeon calmly replied, "Ninety-five percent of everything is crap."
Quite so. The crux of the matter is that heavy internet users are, almost by definition, people who've discovered feasible methods of tuning out the vast quantity of stuff they don't want to read on the internet and tuning in to the stuff they do want to read. People who haven't done this are, naturally, going to be appalled. Complicated tools like Digg and so forth aside, though, the easiest guide to finding blogs you'll want to read is to just find one blog you like. That blog will contain links to other blogs that provides a convenient way to sample them. And if you like one blog, it's probably that you'll like some of the other blogs it links to, and then you can go from there.
Strident blog-haters seem to me to mostly discover blogs by reading a random sample of blogs that have recent posted hostile things about something the discoverer wrote. Naturally, one's tendency is to find such fare uncongenial, and even if you richly deserve the criticism the odds favor many of your critics being genuinely not worth reading. Under the circumstances, it's easy to convince yourself that the whole thing deserves to be tuned out. This, though, is obviously the wrong way to go about things. One doesn't learn the day's news by looking at a random assortment of "newspaper articles" drawn from wherever; as with anything, you need to know what you're doing for it to be worthwhile.
One Man's Pander
"Romney in Iowa," writes Andrew, "An impressive showing. The Republichameleon is not to be underestimated."
Personally, I've been sort of re-evaluating the significance of Romney's flip-floppery in light of John Edwards' campaign. In his case, liberals are primed to believe that Edwards is sincere in his new, more liberal persona, since we tend to think that the New Edwards' stands are correct on the merits, so why shouldn't he find them convincing? Becoming pro-life looks like a pander to me, but to people who find the pro-life view plausible, the view that Romney converted to it is also going to seem more convincing.
And, of course, on a lot of issues it doesn't really matter what politicians "really" think. If Romney wins the White House with a pro-life political persona, then there's every reason to think he'll stay committed to that persona even if he has no real convictions about the issues. It's not, after all, as if there's some even higher office beyond the presidency that one can expect him to reach for.
Photo by Flickr user Seth used under a Creative Commons license.
The Ultimate Nineties Alt-Rock Playlist
By popular demand, you'll find the playlist for the Nineties Alt-Rock Party below. A few words. For one thing, this is just the songs in alphabetical order; at the party itself, the Party Shuffle was in effect. Most important of all, before looking at the list you need to understand what it is and what it is not. This is an effort to recreate the experience of listening to your average "modern rock" radio station during the decade in question. Hence, no hip-hop, no Spice Girls, and no then-obscure indie bands etc. One also gets points for iconicness and the elusive quality of ninetiesness. Hence, "What's the Frequency Kenneth?" represents R.E.M. on the grounds that it's the "most nineites" of R.E.M. songs and "Buddy Holly" represents the Blue Album since it was the monster hit. Arguably, I violated the terms of the arrangement with the Nirvana selections, and it's been put to me that Pavement was sufficiently mainstream to merit inclusion. Be that as it may, the task is inherently subjective and this was my party:
Continue reading "The Ultimate Nineties Alt-Rock Playlist" »
The Case for Vaguness
Mark Schmitt makes the case against trying to force candidates to offer detailed health care plans. I feel like both sides of this argument have pretty persuasive points to make. Realistically, it seems to me that this has now gotten too tied-up in the details of the actual presidential campaign to view especially objectively; among the cognoescenti where you don't find Hillary Clinton supporters, "details are good" means "vote for John Edwards" while "details are bad" means "vote for Barack Obama" and even earnest wonky sorts tend, just like the voters, to actually be more emotionally invested in the personae than in their agendas.
It seems to me that comprehensive health care reform is very unlikely to happen in 2009-10 no matter who wins the election or what tactical approach they take to campaigning. My guess is that this means campaigning on a specific plan will lead to a more spectacular failure, in the strictly literal sense of a spectacle, but ultimately it won't make a big difference one way or the other. Perhaps I'll defend these assertions at some later date.
One Way Or Another
I wouldn't bet my life on it, but I'm pretty sure Atrios is right and the Republican nominee is not, in fact, going to be running on a commitment to end the war in Iraq. Predictions aside, though, it's worth noting that a significant faction of Democrats have persistently believed that the Bush administration was about to begin withdrawing from Iraq ever since 2004.
After three years of that forecast being perpetually wrong, it's now been displaced onto Mitt Romney or John McCain or whomever. Since this idea is so persistent, I think it bears mentioning that it's part of a pretty contradictory set of beliefs. The conventional wisdom, in essence, holds that running stridently against the war spells political doom for the Democrats. It also holds, however, that running stridently against the war is unnecessary because the Republicans will end the war anyway. Meanwhile, the Republicans are supposed to be doing this for political purposes.
These things can't, however, all be true. And, indeed, I think time has proven that the Republicans basically think the "doves are doomed" theory of politics is correct. They attribute their loss in 2006 to corruption and (hilariously) to "earmarks," attribute their wins in 2002 and 2004 to "toughness" and think that it always makes sense politically for the GOP to mark itself off as more militaristic and nationalistic than the opposition. My guess is that the persistent belief that Bush would end the war was driven by a fear that this theory is correct; it's a form of wishful thinking. But people should get over it. The war is, in fact, unpopular. The GOP is, in fact, determined to stay robustly to the Democrats' right on the war. The job facing Democratic politicians and operatives is to learn how to win the argument, not to dream up reasons why that won't be necessary.
Times Says No
The New York Times's editorial yesterday against the immigration deal struck me as reasonably convincing, but I'm still not totally sure. It occurs to me that in a situation like this, it would actually be better if the paper didn't maintain a sharp divide between its reporting and editorial staffs.
Lots of liberals who are in complete agreement about the immigration issue still disagree about the immigration bill because a lot of the disagreement is really about legislative tactics and alternatives. As Ed Kilgore says most of the impulse to reject this bill is driven by a sense that a better one could be achieved. But is that really true? It seems to me like it should be true, a priori, but I'd have a lot more confidence in the Times' editorial position if it was being informed by the Times's congressional correspondents who might be able to bring some additional information to bear.
Copyright Forever
Mark Helprin's gone and done us all the service of advocating the idea that dare not speak its name: Rather than endlessly retroactively extending copyrights, why not make them last forever?
Uh-Oh
Michael Barone likes the immigration deal -- says it reminds him of the 2003 Medicare reform, but in a good way! It reminds me of that bill, too, in that I'm hearing some people say that anything that makes the conservative base this mad can't be all bad. And, indeed, it can't be all bad, but some things are still bad ideas. One of the worst intellectual habits around is to assume that if you get attacked by both sides you must be on the right track.
Chinese Food Update
I keep forgetting to mention this, but after the last time I abused this blog to complain about DC's Chinese food options, a savvy reader recommended Mr. Chen's Organic in Woodley Park. Potentially worth checking out, I thought, but I'm never in Woodley Park. More recently, though, I discovered that my house, though pretty far away, is in Mr. Chen's delivery range. The food is very good -- in NYC it'd be totally unremarkable, but "unremarkable by New York standards" is extraordinary in DC.
It also should be said that DC's Chinatown has at least two good places, Chinatown Express for cheap noodles and Full Kee for a broader menu. There's also good stuff in the suburbs. But for sitting-around-the-house-looking-for-delivery, Mr. Chen's is my new go-to source.
Cartoon of the Day
Via Julian Sanchez. The art accompanies this article about Spencer Ackerman. I've gotta get someone to write a profile of me some day, but I'm hoping to avoid getting fired.
Ackerman on the Training Farce
Speaking of Spencer, his Nation article based on his reporting in Iraq is finally out and about. " Training Iraq's Death Squads," is a good title and gives a general sense of things. Also this:
The militias hardly command the loyalty of every policeman. But police commanders warn that sectarianism has seeped thoroughly into the security apparatus, and it threatens to undermine everything McNellis and his colleagues have accomplished. The professional police they desire may instead become a sharper instrument of sectarian fury.
Right. Politics always comes first. Really well-trained security services do not a pluralistic democracy make.
May 22, 2007
What Is Torture?
Greg Djerejian versus Tom Maguire on whether induced hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding constitute terrorism. Count me as standing with Djerejian in the view that if you can read accounts of the KGB using the technique that clearly paint it as torture, that it's probably torture when the CIA does it, too.
And, to repeat an old-time theme around these parts, it's always worth recalling that it's not a coincidence that torture is associated with authoritarian regimes; these aren't really investigative methods, they're efforts to terrorize a population. Menachim Begin, recalling the use of the "long time standing" method in the USSR, states: "I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them." False confessions were, of course, an integral element of the Stalinist system and torture is an excellent way to generate them. They're not, however, actually useful in fighting terrorism.
Better College Rankings
The other day I floated the idea that the best antidote to the US News and World Report college rankings nonsense would be if the higher education world provided some kind of more meaningful account of school quality on its own. Kevin Carey from Education Sector has done a lot of work in this area. You can see his long paper on reforming college rankings, or else a shorter take for The Washington Monthly if you're interested in pursuing these issues further.
Better Security Through Ethnic Cleaning
Eric Wong and Damien Cave tell the story of a Baghdad success story where Shiite militias have consolidated control and the (Shiite) population enjoys a great deal of security and prosperity, at least by Iraqi standards. As with the troop training issue the point in these cases is that the mission can't be chasing "success" we need to decide what we're trying to succeed at. If the underlying conditions of political pluralism aren't there, then they aren't there, and the bravery of American troops isn't going to change that.
Here All Week
Peter Vecsey brings the funny:
Jimmy Carter described as "careless" his remarks ("I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, has been the worst in history") about the George Bush administration. Ever the politician, Carter claimed he was talking about the Dolans, whom he referred to as "a bush administration."
Indeed. Realistically, it's hard to imagine any administration performing worse than James Buchanans. Such an administration's policies would more-or-less have to result in the actual destruction of the United States in order to qualify. I think Vecsey also makes sound points about Vince Carter.
Maybe We Can Call Them "Ponies"
The plan, it seems, is for perpetual military occupation, except the term "lily pads" is going to be involved. Jim Henley has more. Fascinatingly, permanently stationing tends of thousands of American soldiers on Iraqi soil in order to "act as a deterrent to other countries in the region" (i.e., control Iraqi foreign policy) seems to be being bruited about as the alternative to George W. Bush perpetual war strategy.
One wonders, at any rate, why all these Arabs are running around believing crazy conspiracy theories about American plots to control the Middle East when it's obvious that we're just trying to promote democracy.
Clinton and Preschool
Hillary Clinton announces support for an ambitious pre-school initiative. Politically, I think this is a great issue for her to take a leading role on since, though it might be a problem in the general election, anything that enhances her "woman" branding can't but help with a primary where Edwards and Obama can gain the support of all the young men and bloggers they like and still lose. It's also a good plan on the merits.
I do, however, think that the release of a quite specific plan in a context that involves neither health care nor John Edwards marks a good opportunity to revisit the debate over policy proposals. It strikes me as very plausible that Hillary Clinton will win the nomination. It also strikes me as very plausible that having won the nomination, Clinton will win the general election and become President of the United States. It does not, however, strike me as remotely plausible that this sequence of events will lead in 2009 to the establishment of a $10 billion per year universal pre-K program. And that's even though such a program probably wouldn't engender a huge amount of interest-group opposition. The objective budgetary circumstances simply aren't amenable to passing that kind of new spending commitment. I think it's great for her to propose a big financial commitment, because that increases the chances of getting a modest financial commitment. That, however, works well because this particular proposal is scalable; you could do a cheaper, more narrowly targeted program if that's all you had the votes for.
If I Won The Lottery
Kevin Durant is a joy to watch, but I'm a traditionalist, and I say it's Oden all the way. He'll be able to anchor the defense from day one and his offensive production in college wasn't too shabby considering he couldn't use his good hand. How would Durant have done last season without his right wrist? High-scoring super-athletic wing players sell sneakers and t-shirts, dominant big men win championships. Michael Jordan is the salient exception, but there's the point -- unless your alternative to a big man is literally the best player ever, you take the center (and, yes, Tim Duncan is a center).
Jukeboxes are Killing The Recording Industry
Stanley Green warns in the April 1962 Atlantic that copyright law needs to crack down on jukebox proprietors, lest the music industry face certain destruction. Does anyone know whether his policies, or anything like them, were ever implemented?
Is John Hood a Robot?
Somehow, I'm not familiar with John Hood's byline. This post he did on Iraq, however, reads like it was put forward by an automatic text generator or something:
Basically, anti-war Democrats think that their statements and policy proposals are a response to an impossible situation in Iraq. They have it backward. Their statements and policy proposals are a main reason why the situation in Iraq is so dire. Like it or not, the enemy is counting on them — it is trying to manipulate American public opinion, because it can't win on the battlefield. Their goal is an ignominious American retreat. It cannot be in our interest to comply.
You also learn in his post that this is exactly what happened in Vietnam. You can tell Hood's not an actual human being, because not only does he put this forward in a totally humorless manner, he does it utterly without self-consciousness like he thinks he's expressing novel ideas rather than warmed over hackneyed propaganda.
Note that this is all grounded in a kind of tawdry knock-off of the Green Lantern Theory. Rather than actual indomitable will, Hood is proposing that what we need to win in Iraq is the appearance of indomitable will, with said appearance to be achieved by stifling domestic political criticism and press coverage. He doesn't, however, actually call for the implementation of the sort of comprehensive media censorship and establishment of a one-party dictatorship that would be the only way to implement his preferred military strategy. Which, of course, is because it's just political propaganda aimed at deflecting blame for the disaster in Iraq away from the architects of the policy and on to its opponents.
The Starbucks Factor
Okay. Here's a question for opponents of "selling out." Is it a bad thing that Feist's The Reminder is on sale in Starbucks? I'll admit that when I saw the album there I was disturbed. Upon a moment's reflection, though, this is just snobbery. I don't like the idea that, in the future, if I praise Feist this may indicate to other people that I'm the sort of person who gets his music recommendations from Starbucks rather than the sort of person who knows a lot about Canadian indie music. But that's selfish and petty. She's welcome to as big and middlebrow an audience as she can find as far as I'm concerned.
Annals of Demagoguery
MoveOn has overwhelmingly been a force for good in America, so it's disappointing to see them getting involved in this kind of hack antics:
Gasoline prices are predicted to be even higher than last summer, even though Big Oil just announced record profits.
Enough is enough! A bill in the House would make gasoline price gouging a federal crime, and it could pass this week! Can you help be sure it does?
Uh huh. I like the idea that it's weird that prices are high "even though" profits are also high and that this is the evidence of "gouging." Oil companies are a kind of a blight the planet, soaking up subsidies they don't deserve and lobbying against emissions regulations we need, so one hesitates to come to their defense. Nevertheless, what makes the oil companies bad is their opposition to much-needed policy changes. The solution is to adopt the policy changes we need -- higher CAFE standards, higher gasoline taxes, a carbon tax, a well-designed cap and trade regime, whatever -- piling this farce on top of the status quo doesn't solve anything.
Cleaned Up!
I don't spend much time in Midtown ever, but it seems to me that when Rudy Giuliani cleaned up Time Square and got rid of all the porn, he seems to have left an awful lot of porn on 8th Avenue in the 40s. Just saying. Looking out the window I see Gotham City Ladies' World, Paradise Alley, Lace 2, and The Playpen all on 8th between 43rd and 44th. There's also this one store where I bought a fake ID when I was sixteen.
But Is Nothing The Alternative?
Phillipe Legrain says the immigration bill is bad, but it's still better than nothing. Well, I agree about that. I don't, however, accept this fatalistic notion that "nothing" is the alternative. In particular, since the compromise bill provides very little in the way of short term relief for illegals in the country already, the costs of delay don't seem especially high.
Meanwhile, the argument that political circumstances will never again be favorable to an amnesty seem off-base to me. Certainly, I'm not prepared to preemptively surrender. The guest worker provision is bad. The Senate should get rid of it. Bush will sign anything that passes. There isn't a binary choice here.
Death Blows
The one really smart thing I learned over all the summer internships of my youth is that the press coverage that really makes a difference for politicians is the coverage that happens in media outlets that aren't about politics. People who read New York Times articles about congressional negotiations tend to have firm opinions about politics. People who get all their political information by accident tend to be swing voters. Thus, Bill Simmons on Minnesota and the draft lottery: "Nobody deserves a stroke of lottery fortune less than Glen Taylor and Kevin McHale, the NBA's version of Bush/Rumsfield for 8-10 years."
The Eames Era
Pandora kept playing songs by The Eames Era for me and I kept thinking, "hey, this is good, maybe I should get the album" but then rejecting that possibility on the grounds that the band has an annoying name. Then Catherine recommend the album, too, and I thought I should get over it. And, indeed, it's a good album.
As she says, "typical Catherine music -- sunny and catchy girl-fronted pop."
May 23, 2007
Union Hotels
What brought me to New York, incidentally, is the Sidney Hillman Awards, which are given to journalists by UNITE/HERE annually. I was staying at my dad's place, but the bulk of the out-of-town honorees plus the post-awards dinner were held at the W Hotel Union Square.
A number of people noted the incongruity between the union theme and the luxury hotel. The reality, however, is that UNITE/HERE is obviously going to have people stay in a unionized hotel. And if you have a unionized hotel, the most reasonable strategy is to have a business model that minimizes labor costs as a share of total costs by, e.g., having super-fancy facilities and high prices.
Copyright Forever, Part II
More here, including a good Proust example.
Retreat and Defeat
Democrats abandon withdrawal timetable. Like Nancy Pelosi, I don't really see what choice the leadership had, but I'm not happy about it:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was so disappointed with the outcome that she said she might vote against the Iraq portion of the package, which will be split into two parts when it comes before the House. "I'm not likely to vote for something that doesn't have a timetable," she said.
I think the GOP has made it clear that they don't intend to compromise or relent on this issue. They'll either pay a price in 2008 and pave the way for an end to the war, or else they won't; what they're not going to do, however, is end the war themselves.
Read Closely
Mark Steyn's not happy that when James Kitfield talked to a bunch of foreign policy experts from both parties and several ideological tendencies (Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Francis Fukuyama, etc.), he didn't make time to give equal weight to the views of crazy people. Fair enough. Then this:
But, if the jig is really up, you could just as easily make the case that it dates back to what Mr Kitson considers that golden age "less than a decade ago" - ie, America's holiday from history, when the wise old foreign-policy stability fetishists had nary a word to say about resurgent Islam, freelance nuclearization, and the demographic decline of the west which makes traditional great-power clubs like the G7 about as relevant to the future as dinner theatre in Florida.
It's obviously quite false to say that the 1990s-vintage foreign policy establishment had nothing to say about nuclear proliferation. But note that the "demographic decline of the west" is paired here quite simply with "resurgent Islam" -- not Islamism or Islamic radicalism or any other kind of qualified version of the worry. The thing we should have been worrying about is simply a resurgence of Islam. I'll count it as a damn good thing that the country wasn't run by people whose idea of the key foreign policy issue of our time was finding a way to get Christians to outbreed the Muslim hordes.
Lotto News
The tragedy of draft lottery analysis is that the conclusion that the big winners here were Portland and Seattle lacks a certain depth. Mainly, the entire Western Conference must be breathing a sigh of relief that Atlanta got a top-three pick, so Phoenix doesn't wind up with a lottery pick with which to further stack their roster. Beyond that, who really knows what to say?
It seems to me that Chad Ford is probably wrong to think the Hawks will use their #3 pick on Mike Conley, if only because if there's one thing Atlanta's management is good at, it's passing on the opportunity to draft point guards despite the existence of a clear need. It'd be hilarious to see yet another long, athletic swingman heading to Georgia, but I think Corey Brewer should start developing a taste for peaches. Also -- whoever advised Joakim Noah to stay in school one more year gives really bad advice.
Visas for Grads
I'm not a huge Tom Friedman fan, but this reaction to seeing a bunch of foreign-born newly minted PhDs seems just right:
Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud that our country continues to build universities and a culture of learning that attract the world’s best minds. My complaint — why I also wanted to cry — was that there wasn’t someone from the Immigration and Naturalization Service standing next to President Jackson stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of these foreign-born Ph.D.’s. I want them all to stay, become Americans and do their research and innovation here. If we can’t educate enough of our own kids to compete at this level, we’d better make sure we can import someone else’s, otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.
It's really baffling that we would give someone a visa to pursue high-level education in the United States and then do anything other than automatically give them a visa to work here. If we're going to be stingy with anything, it should be with spots at our universities (in practice, there tend not to be Americans clamoring to get graduate schooled in technical disciplines), not spots in our labor force. Unlike the immigration of unskilled workers, immigration of highly skilled people is a totally uncomplicated balance of considerations. It's good for the immigrant, it boosts the American economy as a whole, and instead of putting mild downward pressure on the wages of the least-fortunate native born people, the costs are borne by better-off Americans. It's a total no-brainer.
Independent Thinking
Never let it be said that the gang at National Review are just partisan hacks. Here, for example, Andy McCarthy slams the Bush administration for demonstrating insufficient zeal in the use of the criminal justice system to intimidate reporters. There's something rather grimly fascinating about the strong grassroots support for authoritarianism out there on the American right.
"Pro-American"
Oliver Kamm and Andrew Sullivan both detect a certain lack of quality in speculation as to the nature of Gordon Brown's foreign policy views that puts a lot of emphasis on his admiration for Cape Cod as a source of the belief that he'll pursue a "pro-American" line.
All true, but also all tending to indicate a certain blinkered quality to the "anti-Americanism" frame. Francophilia is, I think, something we all understand as being distinct from admiration for French foreign policy and a desire to see France' hand strengthened abroad. The Francophile loves Paris, or the countryside in the South; admires French literature and painting; is charmed by the way French women throw their scarves so stylishly and with seemingly so little effort. As to whether or not you think France's heavyhandedly neocolonial approach to Francophone Africa has been a good thing, this is neither here nor there.
The reason is that one's feelings about French national power have, at the end of the day, almost nothing to do with one's feelings about France. Similarly, it's not a dislike of America that leads many people to be uncomfortable with exercises of unilateral American military might. Having a foreign country deploy so much lethal force so cavalierly and with so little regard to world opinion or international institutions is, simply put, frightening and it's this frightening quality that drives negative views of the US; not negative views of the US that make unilateral militarism scary.
Spectrum Management Blogging
Just try pitching an editor an article on spectrum management policy some day. I dare you. Well, actually, it turns out I probably should have tried to pitch it to a business magazine, since Forbes ran a big piece on the subject by Tim Wu. The details are kind of dull, but the upshot is that it's very important that the FCC adopt what's called a "right to attach" rule when it auctions off new spectrum in the near future; said right meaning that any device capable of connecting to a network safely (i.e., without screwing up other people's ability to use the network) must be allowed to do so.
Matt Stoller has more on the politics.
Edwards at CFR
I'm off to see John Edwards' speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. Readers will recall that I have some doubts about Edwards on the national security front, so I'll be interested to hear what he has to say. This genre of speech -- the "major foreign policy address" by a presidential candidate -- tends to be dull, but Edwards' 2008 campaign has shown a flare for dramatic gestures so maybe this one will be different. You can see a webcast here. This looks promising to me.
Matt Yglesias Will Have His Revenge on John Edwards
Speech hasn't started yet. Worse. After being informed second-hand that there was room for me in the press section of the event, it turns out that there . . . isn't room for me in the real press section; I'm in some overflow space. My new plan is to do everything in my power to ruin Edwards' shot at the White House.
On The Speech, Seriously
Okay. The speech is very impressive on several of the more technical aspects of military policy -- stuff about the budget, the larger context of the national security budget, civil-military relations, that kind of thing. It's also genuinely great to see a high-profile politician taking on the "war on terror" concept. That section of the speech even got my hopes up that as he outlined an alternative strategy he might really truly win me over by mentioning a phrase like "political grievances" but instead he kind of lost me with a segue into "new efforts to lead the fight against global poverty." On the other hand, fighting global poverty is a good thing, and Edwards' has gone farther down the right path on this subject than anyone else.
Problems!
Edwards seems to me to have on display here a tendency to say something very smart and then to some extent take it back. After a strident call for withdrawal from Iraq, he said that, well, he actually might keep some troops in Iraq. After a great attack ("some politicians have fallen right in line behind President Bush's recent proposal to add 92,000 troops between now and 2012, with little rationale given for exactly why we need this many troops") on his rivals, Edwards winds up punting a little while later -- "we might need a substantial increase of troops . . . proposals are worth close examination . . . need to avoid throwing numbers around . . . I will carefully assess the post-Iraq threat environment . . . determine the exact number of troops we need."
The idea for a "'Marshall Corps' modeled on the military Reserves, of up to 10,000 expert professionals who will help stabillize weak societies, and who will work on humanitarian missions" seemed under-explained. The real worry for me, though, is on the nuclear proliferation front. Edwards didn't really address this topic squarely at all. He did say we need better intelligence, and he said military force should be used "to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons" and it was a bit unclear to me what that means for, say, Iran.
All-in-all, I'm not in love, but I was impressed. Obama was much better on proliferation, but Edwards is doing a great job of pushing the envelop on topics like the need to get fence-sitters on our side, the need to move beyond "war on terror" rhetoric, etc.
Q&A
It turns out that when Edwards got asked a question about nuclear proliferation he had a perfectly good answer. He said he's like to associate himself more-or-less with these sentiments, that we should commit ourselves to not building new nuclear weapons, need to lead an international effort to close the holes in the NPT, and I wish it had been in his prepared remarks because then I'd have them in front of me and I could quote him in more detail. Totally solid, though unremarkable, answer.
Things I Wouldn't Have Guessed
It seems that you can't use Pandora in Canada. Why is that? Does Canada have much more onerous internet radio royalty payments or something?
Selling In Circles
Lockheed Martin does work, as my friend Pete might say:
Right now, the Pentagon is paying Lockheed billions to build a new fleet of F-22 Raptor stealth fighters. The Air Force and Navy have justified the program, which has become something of a boondoggle, by pointing to the spread of U.S.-built F-16 and F-18 fighters around the world. Indeed, a few years back, Lockheed was circulating a promotional pamphlet for the F-22, which stressed the need to maintain U.S. "air superiority" by pointing to countries around the world that were either adversaries or potential adversaries. It turned out that most of those countries were worrisome because they had... fleets of U.S.-built F-16s. Arms sales really are the gift that keeps on giving.
Excellent. It seems to me that the role of defense contractors in pushing policy in a bad direction gets weirdly neglected.
Shrum versus Edwards?
I have a review forthcoming of Bob Shrum's memoir, so I don't want to say much about that at the moment. My review didn't, however, really deal with the subject of Mike Crowley's piece on the book which focuses on the idea that Shrum deliberately slams John Edwards in the book. I had a very different reaction to the book than did Crowley. I agree that Shrum paints Edwards in a bad light in several places, but what I thought to myself while reading them was "the crazy thing is that Shrum seems to think this makes Edwards look good!"
At any rate, Crowley makes a convincing case, but what motivated my alternative reading was that unrelated portions of the book dealing with other people indicated to me that Shrum likes to deploy a very heavy hand when grinding his axes. The Edwards passages didn't feel like that to me. One source of contention, for example, is that Shrum says in the book that Edwards' vote for the war was basically a political position move that Shrum (among others) advocated that went against Edwards' instincts. The Edwards campaign has made it clear that they really don't like this story, and instead prefer to focus on the issue of flawed intelligence and misplaced faith in George W. Bush. It seems perfectly plausible to me that Shrum would have believed that Shrum's account paints Edwards in a more favorable light -- Edwards is a man of sound judgment who in a moment of weakness bowed to expediency and has ever since learned to stick to his guns. Obviously, Team Edwards doesn't see it that way, but it continues to be a bit unclear to me what mistake, exactly, Edwards is trying to say he made with that vote.
Post Hoc Clarification
Okay, one last thing on Edwards' speech. I got to talk to one of Edwards' advisors after the speech and he clarified to me that some of what I felt the speech was missing wasn't actually "missing" per se. Rather, it's going to be in a different speech. Michael Signer's blog post here lays out the concept, which I hadn't understood going in:
This speech is the second in a five-part cycle of speeches in which Senator Edwards explains his vision of renewing America's moral authority and our leadership of the world. The cycle began two months ago, when he presented a major speech about how to solve global poverty. Today, he's presenting a military and national security policy that will explain how we can rebuild the military from the Bush years, so our strength will support our moral leadership of the world in a new century of new challenges. This Friday, he'll talk about restoring our sacred contract with our veterans, servicemen and women, and military families. And in the coming months, he'll complete the cycle with two more major speeches. The fourth speech will be on civil liberties, and how America can stay stronger by respecting the rule of law and human rights. The fifth and final speech will provide his overarching foreign policy vision for the challenges of the coming years, including a rising China and India, an increasingly undemocratic Russia, spreading nuclearization, and the Middle East. Together, the five speeches will comprise an overarching vision for an America that is at once strong, secure, and just--that once again is a moral leader for the world.
In short, the speech was strongest on military reform issues because that's what the speech was supposed to be about and we'll have to wait for the fifth and final speech to hear about the "overarching foreign policy vision."
The Poor Get Poorer
Shocking but true, The Wall Street Journal editorial page's "The Poor Get Richer" characterization of a new CBO study (PDF) is misleading. Here's the real shape of things:
See Jon Chait for analysis of how they twist everything around. Brendan Nyhan has even more and I got the chart from him.
May 24, 2007
Steyn's Islamophobia
Some readers thought I was being too hard on Mark Steyn, who may have just been typing sloppily when he fretted yesterday about "resurgent Islam, freelance nuclearization, and the demographic decline of the west," making no distinction between Islam as such and violent jihadist ideologies. It was, however, no mistake. Here's Gideon Rachman on Steyn's book:
Mr Steyn argues that – “Europe has all but succumbed to the dull opiate of multiculturalism.” Indeed “a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman” – a Muslim general who made it to the outskirts of Paris in 732. With apparent relish Mr Steyn predicts a “Eurabian civil war”. The weak-kneed elites will succumb to militant Islam. But an “unreconstructed minority” will turn to “neo-nationalist strongmen”. The poor old Europeans can’t win. It’s either appeasement or fascism.
Here, again, the "enemy" is being defined very broadly; Europe simply has too many Muslims living in it. Their immigration constitutes a "fearless Muslim advance."
Must Be in The Water
I dunno if anything analagous shows up on the Post's print edition, but look at this:
We're seriously just now supposed to be considering the possibility that the Bush administration might have bad intentions?
Penn Watch
Bloomberg reports:
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton proposed on Feb. 27 more research funds for new energy technology, including "clean" coal systems. The next day, Mark Penn, her top campaign strategist, had a different take on coal.
In an internal blog at his other job, as chief executive officer of public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, Penn wrote of how Burson worked "behind the scenes" for TXU Corp., a Texas company seeking to build power plants fueled by pulverized coal, which some environmentalists say would be major polluters.
More to the point, it seems to me, is that so-called "clean" coal is more-or-less a scam -- it's still got all those carbon emissions. It's a scam, however, that a lot of politicians adopt because they want to win votes in coal country. Certainly, it's the sort of scam a political consultant might tell you that you absolutely must adopt to stay politically viable. And if that consultant also just so happens to be on the payroll of coal companies well, then, I think you can see where a problem might arise.
A Devastating Tag Team
I was going to just ignore New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz's efforts to bait me, but when Jonah Goldberg piled on it was just too much intellectual firepower to stay out of the fray. Now, seriously, what Brian Beutler said. And what Brian Ulrich said. Honestly, though, I'm done with this feud as there's really no point in arguing with someone who's proud of his role in bringing Charles Krauthammer into the national conversation.
The Clinton Rose
People tell me David Broder used to be a journalistic powerhouse. Discussing his dreams of a Huckabee-Richardson matchup, the Dean says:
Odds are it will never happen, even though Americans have tended to prefer governors over senators when it comes to picking a president. That's why no sitting senator has been elected president since John F. Kennedy in 1960.
But Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both of whom went straight from the statehouse to the White House, have taken much of the bloom off that particular rose.
The Bill Clinton who left office with a 66 percent approval rating took the bloom off the statehouse rose? How so? And seriously, why can't Broder just say that Broder didn't like Bill Clinton, why the need to project this dislike onto an electorate that thought he was great?
Supporting the Troops
"This so-called 'supplemental' isn't about supporting troops," writes Laura Flanders for The Nation, "this blank-check bill is about sacrificing them." Similarly, I was recently invited to join the Facebook group "Support The Troops, End the War", a John Edwards initiative that also has a conventional website here.
The messaging point here is pretty clear. "Support the troops," has proven to be a useful slogan for people who really intend to demand support for the incumbent administration's foreign policy. The point that it's odd to support the troops by indefinitely prolonging their exposure to a hazardous and futile situation has, moreover, real merit. However, as Spencer Ackerman writes in The Washington Monthly, liberals can ill-afford to fool themselves into thinking that by pushing for an end to the war we're supporting the actual expressed desires of the troops.
There are, of course, anti-war soldiers who want nothing more than to come home. But the evidence suggests that they're a distinct minority, and that support for continuing the war is much stronger among active duty soldiers than it is among the general population. If liberals ever do succeed in ending the war, we can expect that many of the soldiers who actually served in the war will happily embrace the right's stab in the back theory, that the war was lost by its opponents rather than by its architects.
Polling the Troops
I think it's a telling example of the level of desire to believe that the troops agree with liberals about the war in Iraq that DanTheMan cited this 2006 Military Times poll as contradicting my claim that the troops don't want to end the war. The poll does say that "barely one-third of service members approve of the way the president is handling the war" and that "in this year’s poll only 41 percent of the military said the U.S. should have gone to war in Iraq in the first place." It doesn't, however, say the troops want to stop the war:
Global Test
Brian Beutler directs my attention to the top ten finalists to become Hillary Clinton's campaign theme song.
The major problem here is that a strikingly large proportion of these artists aren't even Americans. I mean: Shania Twain, Celine Dion? Is Clinton trying to tell us she's some sort of Canadian Communist? Tunstall's Scottish, U2 is Irish, it's all totally unacceptable. Brian says she should pick The Temptations, but I think Tina Turner is the way to go here. Retaining the loyalty of African-American women is the key to stopping Obama, and Turner is the best way to accomplish that and, as best I can tell, comes with no meaningful downside.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama's favorite musicians, according to Facebook, are Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, J.S. Bach, and the Fugees, making him the very model of the modern non-threatening black man. John Edwards cites Bruce Springsteen, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Natalie Allyn Wakeley Sleeth as artists he likes.
The Epistemology of John McCain
When I read Ezra Klein's brief comment on Howard Fineman's unsupported assertion that "McCain is a warrior. He knows the world, its dangers and wonders; he knows the military, its powers and its limitations," I was initially just going to say "right on!" After all, I see no evidence whatsoever that McCain believes the military has any limitations. The only criticism I've ever seen John McCain make of either Bill Clinton's foreign policy or George W. Bush's foreign policy is that he has, at various points, accused both men of being unduly reluctant to start wars and then, once wars have been started, to accuse both men of sending an insufficient level of manpower and firepower to fight in the wars.
In short, it's McCain has the record of someone who doesn't think there are any limits at all. Fineman's article turns out to be full of this stuff. McCain "has a big campaign organization, and substantive knowledge of most every issue." Really? The candidate who first thought about AIDS just a couple of months ago? Even better, McCain "deserves credit for courage, too." What about the pandering? "Yes, he has pandered to the Bush crowd and religious conservatives (though he seems uncomfortable doing it, or overcompensates by being too enthusiastic, and all in all looks like he is following a dance-step chart)." In short, McCain courageously chose to pander unconvincingly, thus indicating to Fineman via a secret decoder ring of some kind that he's still willing to take courageous stands as long as he doesn't need to take them publicly or pay a political price for doing so.
People Vote on Election Day
What Rosenfeld said, with emphasis added:
If you don't have the votes for a withdrawal timeline you don't have the votes, but the lipstick-on-a-pig rationalizations we're hearing from some Democrats (see the excerpts from Stoller) are truly crazy. To be blunt, even if the political calculations offered in defense of voting for the bill were correct (and that's dubious), it's not even an election year. Democrats are discussing all the mean things Republicans might say about them "during the upcoming recess week" as if voters go to the polls on Memorial Day -- and as if the GOP and the president were in the shape they were in, say, five years ago. The instinctiveness of the crouched, defensive posture you see from some of these folks is just sorry (and a contrast with the real sense of momentum that had been notable this year up until now).
This, to me, has been one of the most baffling things about the Democratic Party's tactical posture on Iraq ever since early 2003. You see politicians talking and acting as if the crucial thing is whether or not what they're doing will look popular over the next 36 hours. The important thing, of course, is how things look on election day. As Sam says, if the votes aren't there, the votes aren't there, but the important point is that liberals who take the position today that there should be a withdrawal timeline will be fully vindicated by November 2008 just as people who avoided the temptation to pander when Saddam Hussen was captured back in late '03 looked pretty smart by November '04.
If the way the nose-counting works out is that a supplemental passes with GOP votes plus a tiny rump of conservative Democrats, then so be it. But if you favor withdrawal on the merits, then you've got to believe that taking the stand now will look prescient in twelve months. Meanwhile, all the polls indicate that the voters agree with liberals about the issue at hand.
Got Your Back
Joe Klein's taking some hits in the blogosphere, and J-Pod's loving it:
I don't know what the rules should be, but since today my sometime friend Joe Klein chose to describe the eminent Bernard Lewis, who has forgotten more about Islam than Joe Klein has ever known about any subject, as a "quasi-racist" because of Lewis's unbelievably well-informed ideas about the interplay of Islam and nationhood — which include the "quasi-racist" notion that Muslims can govern themselves democratically — I say: Let the netroots chew him up.
But here's the thing: Lewis' views of Muslims are "quasi-racist" or whatever the appropriate term is for holding the sort of views about the members of a religious group that one would term "racist" were they held about a racial group. This is actually not inconsistent with the fact that Lewis is considerably more knowledgeable about the history of the Islamic world than I am, and my guess is that he knows more about this than Klein does as well. Colonial regimes in Africa were full of administrators who both new a bunch of stuff about Africa and also happened to be white supremacists -- both attributes were important job qualifications.
Meanwhile, Bush (and Podhoretz) aren't relying on Lewis to help them bone up before a Jeopardy appearance -- they're seeking expert support for their pre-existing commitment to the proposition that there's nothing wrong with U.S. policy toward the Muslim world that a little additional brutality couldn't fix.
Help Me Help You Help Me
If you think you belong on the prestigious list of people likely to do me valuable book PR favors and have some reason to believe that this fact wouldn't be obvious to me (maybe I don't know you read the blog, maybe I don't realize how important you are), do feel free to get in touch.
More Lewis
Michael Hirsch here probably has the best take on Bernard Lewis in terms of contemporary foreign policy debates (I'm not going to try to denigrate his scholarship on the Ottoman Empire since, obviously, I don't know a thing about it).
Let's Hope This Is False
Steve Clemons has a heck of a tale to tell over it has blog. Roughly speaking, Clemons says Dick Cheney fears that George W. Bush is disinclined to start a war with Iran, and that he's going to let Condoleezza Rice and her staff continue with a diplomatic approach that Cheney thinks is doomed to failure, but that has the support of Robert Gates, Mike McConnell, and Michael Hayden.
Cheney and his allies, the story goes, are trying to tell the Israeli government that they should find "some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran's nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles)." That done, the political context in the United States will change, and Cheney believes it will set the stage for an abandonment of the diplomatic approach and the deployment of American military options.
Still Snapping
I like this guy:
I’m a high school student in Oakland, California. I have zero qualifications to write about anything of importance besides the fact that I have a computer, internet access and spend too much time reading. I am Mickey Kaus’ Worst Nightmare.
This is smart, too. I think the site would be better were it nymous (is that a word?) and it's also easier to build an audience if you post more often. That said, good work anonymous whippersnapper!
Timing Is Everything
Looks like Democrats picked a great moment to blink in their confrontation with President Bush over Iraq. Fresh data: "Americans now view the war in Iraq more negatively than at any time since the war began, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll." If only there were an opposition congress or something:
A majority of Americans continue to support a timetable for withdrawal. Sixty-three percent say the United States should set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq sometime in 2008.
While the troops remain in Iraq, the overwhelming majority of Americans support continuing to finance the war, though most want to do so with conditions. Thirteen percent want Congress to block all spending on the war. The majority, 69 percent, including 62 percent of Republicans, say Congress should appropriate money for the war, but on the condition that the United States sets benchmarks for progress and that the Iraqi government meets those goals. Fifteen percent of all respondents want Congress to approve war spending without conditions.
To me, the only real explanation for Democratic behavior is this. The party's leadership and political thinkers simply can't conceive of national security issues as anything other than a source of potential political problems to be coped with, never as a set of potential political opportunities. Since congress can't unilaterally end the war, then, there's no reason to have a confrontation with Bush; national security debates are just pure downside. Overwhelming polling data backing the liberal position isn't a reason to go on offense, it's a reason to think Democrats can succeed in slinking away.
May 25, 2007
Close!
Why do you think it is that when the NBA Gods decided to deliver us two unexpectedly nail-bitey Eastern Conference games they also decreed that the style of play would be ultra-dull, over up college scores with NBA game times? Statistically, the new Flip Saunders Pistons are an elite offensive team whose defense has slipped from its previous heights. This, though, looks a bit like the ghost of Larry Brown is running things.
Ghost Busters As Rightwing Agitprop
Reihan Salam has the goods:
Then there is my favorite example, and possibly my favorite movie of all time, Ghostbusters. (In this life, you are either a Chevy Chase man or a Bill Murray man. I am a Bill Murray man.) From start to finish, Ghostbusters is a powerful brief against the “reality-based community.” The academic establishment and the municipal powers-that-be have failed to tackle a grave threat, namely the menace posed by ancient Sumerian deities summoned by effete post-Christian necromancers who flourished amidst the moral turpitude of Art Deco New York. Only a small, nimble, private-sector cadre of “Ghostbusters” can meet the gathering storm – if only Walter Peck of the Environmental Protection Agency wouldn’t get in the way! I ain’t ‘fraid of no ghost, and I ain’t ‘fraid of no bien-pensant anti-Ghostbusting bureaucrats either.
Quite true. Mass market comedy, as seen in Hollywood films, strikes me as a pretty good partner for post-Goldwater conservatism. Comedy, to be funny, usually requires the skewering of the powerful in some sense. But the mass culture marketing demands that your product not actually do much to challenge prevailing ideas in the world. It's a bit of a paradoxical situation, but it nicely mirrors the efforts of a political ideology designed to further entrench the privileges of the country's wealthy elite and its white Christian majority and somehow do so in the name of anti-elitism.
Also: Ken Starr Hates Her
I can't believe The Washington Post reported this with a straight face:
"Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton," by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., reports that during her husband's 1992 campaign, a team she oversaw hired a private investigator to undermine Gennifer Flowers "until she is destroyed." Flowers had said publicly that she had an affair with Bill Clinton while he was governor of Arkansas.
The book also suggests that Hillary Clinton did not read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in 2002 before voting to authorize war. And it includes a thirdhand report that the Clintons had a secret plan after the 1992 election in which he would have eight years as president and then she would have eight years, although last night a key source disavowed the story.
In short, Jeff Gerth, author of any number of sloppy and inaccurate anti-Clinton stories, now has a book full of anti-Clinton stories, at least some of which we can already tell are sloppy and inaccurate. Another thing worth noting, of course, is that while books appear weightier and more definitive than newspapers and magazines, there's actually no fact checking and relatively little editing involved in putting together a book. Any news that actually "breaks" in book format is almost certainly news that couldn't be sources rigorously enough for periodical publication.
When Wingnuts Fight
National Review gets attacked by The Wall Street Journal editorial page on immigration, and NRO writers are taken aback by how slipshod and dishonest the WSJ is. What they don't seem to realize is that this is how they write all the time.
Mass Transit
What Michael O'Hare said. Let me just add that one thing which surprised me when I went to LA was the extent to which substantial portions of the city were actually much higher-density than I'd anticipated. I assume that at some point in LA's development the whole city really was low-density sprawl. It's also true that if you compare LA to New York City, it's all low-density. But a lot of LA looked quite a bit denser than Washington, DC; just laid-out differently and without reasonable transit options.
Gone 'Till September
EJ Dionne speaks up for the Democratic leadership, and says they played the Iraqi supplemental as well as they could have. I don't think I really agree, but this is the right conclusion anyway: "In a divided system, democracy can be frustratingly slow. But it usually works. Critics of the war should spend less time mourning the setbacks of May and begin organizing for a showdown in September."
No To Guest Workers
I make the case in The Guardian. Paul Krugman also has a column on the subject.
UPDATE: Economist's View excerpts generously from Krugman's column.
Fighting Them Over There
I hardly have the energy to wrestle with George W. Bush's public statements on grand strategy anymore, but when he says something like "If we were to fail, they'd come and get us" it's worth asking what, exactly, the causal chain here is supposed to be. US troops in Iraq aren't trying to prevent people currently in Iraq from leaving Iraq. And while various government agencies are</