What He Said
I agree with almost every word of Fareed Zakaria's latest essay on what the country needs to do, post-Bush, in terms of restoring America's position in the world.
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June 3, 2007 - June 9, 2007 Archives
June 3, 2007
Rove's Non-Genius
A correspondent pointed out an even bigger problem with Karl Rove's dreams of long-term domination that I missed previously. Rove cites the notion that the younger generation is more spiritual as evidence in favor of the looming reign of the right wing. Which is fine if true, except that the younger generation doesn't hold much in the way of Christian Right issue positions on the key sexual orientation issues that have been the GOP's main evangelical mobilization tool in recent years.
Sunday Random Photo Blogging
I took this picture and I think it looks pretty cool -- long exposure time, low exposure, at night on the beach.
The Classified NIE
One issue that came up in the debate was whether or not reading the classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq would have given Hillary Clinton and/or John Edwards a better perspective on the war. Years later, and in the heat of a primary campaign, it's a bit hard to look objectively at that issue. But if you look at the relevant section of this 2003 Judis/Ackerman joint on the manipulation of intelligence, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they really should have read it.
We learn that Bob Graham "received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive." It also seems that the Senate Intel Committee "received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments." Graham and Dick Durbin had been demanding an NIE on Iraq "and toward the end of September, it was delivered. Like Tenet's earlier letter, the classified NIE was balanced in its assessments. Graham called on Tenet to produce a declassified version of the report that could guide members in voting on the resolution." But when the declassified version came out "Graham and Durbin were outraged to find that it omitted the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration's case for war."
All War All The Time
Via Scott Horton, Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein notes that the geniuses in the Defense Department seem to have been deliberately courting US-China conflict:
While Bush publicly continued the one-China policy of his five White House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon “neocons” took a different tack, quietly encouraging Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian. “The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”
This is, of course, no surprise. Francis Fukuyama has recounted that during the 1990s doldrums Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan discussed the fact that their "Neo-Reaganite" foreign policy required a new enemy, and that people in their circle debated whether to make the enemy China or Islamism. They reached the conclusion that China was the best option, only to reverse course after 9/11 and put the emphasis on Islamism. In either case, they regard US-China conflict -- and, indeed, conflict between the United States and other countries generally -- as something to be encouraged.
Judis vs. Kirckick
It's good New Republic versus bad New Republic and I'm afraid that while it's not much of a competition it's certainly fun to watch.
The Finals
So my prediction of a boringly easy Detroit victory over Cleveland wasn't exactly born out. It seems that we are all witnesses to the brilliance of Daniel Gibson (or something). Since I picked the Cavs to get blown about by the Pistons, I suppose my prediction that the Cavs are going to get blown out by San Antonio may not carry a ton of credibility, but the fact still remains that this is going to be a Finals reminiscent of the Spurs-Nets matchup of yore.
Nice Work
People put hard work into putting together health care plans and this is what they get for their trouble:
Health care is also likely to provide points of difference. Obama laid out his health-care plan last week. Edwards offered his plan much earlier, and Clinton had put some of her ideas on the table as well. All point toward universal coverage as their goal but differ in how rapidly and dramatically they would move to get there.
That's the last graf of a 1,000 word article. It manages to neither describe the differences between the Edwards and Obama plans nor the point of similarity. It doesn't even say which candidate is moving more "rapidly and dramatically" in the direction of universal coverage. It doesn't note that Clinton has not, in fact, laid out her ideas for expanding coverage. And yet, were the candidates to not release policy proposals for the press to ignore, the press would condemn them as lacking substance.
Where Was Pat?
Andrew Sullivan quotes from Daniel Larison: "My 2000 Buchanan vote seems smarter and smarter every day."
This reminds me that Buchanan's 2000 campaign struck me as wildly undermotivated at the time. By today, it looks very well motivated in retrospect -- there seems to be a clear political space for someone who espouses a Buchanan-esque combination of foreign policy restraint, globalization skepticism, nativism, and culture war populism. Crucially, this political space also seemed to be open in 2004. If Buchanan had run then rather than in 2000, it seems to me that he could have easily picked up 3-4 percent and tipped the election to Kerry.
Debate Late Liveblogging
Okay, I forgot to tune this in until very late in the game and came on board just in time to see Joe Biden saying something moronic about Darfur.
On the "defining rich" question, Edwards kicked Obama's ass even though he spent most of his time talking about the misguided element of his college tuition scheme.
On the deficit, Bill Richardson is sounding a bit like a slick Republican and I don't mean that in a good way.
It's too bad that Dennis Kucinich is such a weirdo, since while I don't really agree with what he has to say, his message deserves to be taken a lot more seriously than it is.
Now my roommate is changing back to the MTV Movie Awards.
Eric Alterman Fought The Law
And, it seems, the law won.
UPDATE: Eric's side of the story is a bit long for the front page, but it's here below the fold and from CNN's report:
Powers
If you're looking for a good new comic book to read (and who isn't) let me recommend Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. I read the first, second, seventh, eighth, and ninth trade paperbacks last week at the beach and it's really solid stuff through-and-through. The basic premise is that you're reading noir-style detective stories focused on two homicide comics working the "powers-related" beat. It's a neat way of dealing with super hero themes, iconography, and other good comics-y stuff without making it a super hero book per se, since it has much more the look, feel, and tone of crime and detective stories.
The complete first story arc, "Who Killed Retro Girl?" is available online.
June 4, 2007
Beyond Regime Change
Joe Biden was making sense last night when he called America's efforts to extract concessions from Iran while simultaneously musing about overthrowing the government "bizarre." Reza Aslan spelled out an argument along these lines on Saturday.
Debate Wrap-Up
I'm trying to think of something interesting to say about the debate that doesn't involve going meta or just doing amateur theater criticism, but I've really got nothing. Instead, a question: Did anyone out there in blog-land find this to be a helpful exercise? Like is there someone out there who wasn't sure who they were going to vote for pre-debate who's now more firmly in someone's corner? Someone out there who was strongly leaning in one direction and is now back to undecided status? Not me.
My read of what I see in these debates is so heavily colored by ex ante beliefs and information that it's hard for the debate to change anything. During the first 100 days question, for example, John Edwards gave his spiel about "restoring American leadership" which Hillary Clinton followed up by straightforwardly saying that bringing the troops home from Iraq would be Priority Number 1 in a Clinton administration. In a vacuum, that from Clinton would have impressed me a great deal. But in the real world it didn't -- it's impossible to say for sure in June 2007 what the different contenders would do in January 2009, but most signs indicate that Clinton would be the most reluctant of the big three to move toward rapid and total withdrawal.
Mandates
Paul Krugman says Obama's health care plan is pretty good but with a crucial flaw: "The Obama plan doesn’t mandate insurance for adults. So some people would take their chances — and then end up receiving treatment at other people’s expense when they ended up in emergency rooms. In that regard it’s actually weaker than the Schwarzenegger plan." This is true, but I think it's a pretty minor issue. Len Nichols puts the more important element of the case for mandates thusly:
Mandates go a long way toward correcting this "adverse selection" problem by putting everyone in the same risk pool. If everyone is required to buy, then insurers worry far less about attracting a disproportionate share of sicker patients, because the reluctant "young immortals" are buying, too. So the excess resources they now devote to underwriting and targeted marketing will be largely redundant and disappear. This is why John Sheils of The Lewin Group concluded that Senator Wyden's plan achieves such great administrative savings -- insurers will voluntarily disarm if everyone has to buy, and then the rest of us can stop paying them to figure out how to legally deny coverage to the sick.
This is the best way to understand things. Under a mandate/subsidize scheme like Edwards' plan, you have two different ways of trying to make health care more affordable. On the one hand, you have direct subsidies provided by the government out of tax revenues. On the other hand, you have indirect subsidies provided by young healthy people who are forced to buy insurance at an actuarially unfair rate to cross-subsidize insurance for higher-risk people.
If the genuine focus of your mandate concern was Krugman's emergency room patients, then you could just mandate that everyone carry a high-deductible plan (this would be closer to the car insurance analogy that sometimes gets bandied about) and alleviate that. The real issue is that the mandate is supposed to be a way to resolve adverse selection issues while still retaining some of the structural properties of a competitive market. As it happens, my view is that mandates will -- if tried -- prove to be wildly less effective at achieving this goal than their proponents believe, but I'm in the distinct minority on this.
Don't Call It a Comeback
From the laugh or cry file, comes today's Fred Hiatt column, which to understand properly you need to recall that Hiatt spent years and years insinuating the opponents of the Iraq War were all obviously pacifists or isolationists and probably hated America and freedom besides. Then he reads Barack Obama's Foreign Affairs article, sees that Obama is not an isolationist or a pacificist, and concludes that Obama has the same views as Mitt Romney and his views are also "strikingly similar to Bush administration policy."
Absolutely every point of comparison Hiatt sees between Obama and Bush/Romney, meanwhile, would apply equally to John Edwards or Hillary Clinton. Obama wants to reform the UN! Obama wants to secure loose nuclear material! Obama wants "to defeat al-Qaeda" and says he'll build an alliance to do so! Apparently, there are no foreign policy disagreements between any mainstream political figure in America!
In essence, Hiatt is under assault from straw men of his own devising. Having mischaracterized the opponents of the Bush foreign policy, he's now confronted with what such opponents actually think and concluded that they don't oppose Bush's policy at all. But there's obviously a huge difference between the Bush/Romney approach of defining the United States as locked in endless combat with an amorphous and endlessly-growing set of frightening Muslims and saying you're going to dedicate serious energy to focusing on and targeting al-Qaeda. These aren't just different things, they're opposing sentiments. So, yes, the range of debate from Edwards/Obama to the Bush Republican mainstream is certainly circumscribed, but there are still large and meaningful differences here.
DeLong on the Obama Plan
Brad DeLong makes the case for Barack Obama's approach to the health care reform issue. I pretty much agree.
Late to the Party
Shockingly enough, it seems that the surge isn't working after all. Not only is it not working as an effort to advance American strategic interests, it can't even achieve its own self-proclaimed tactical objectives of securing Baghdad neighborhoods: "American and Iraqi forces were able to 'protect the population' and 'maintain physical influence over' only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods."
The crucial problem was that the planners who "had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July" are disappointed "in large part because Iraqi police and army units, which were expected to handle basic security tasks, like manning checkpoints and conducting patrols, have not provided all the forces promised, and in some cases have performed poorly." Indeed, it turns out that "The heavily Shiite security forces have also repeatedly failed to intervene in some areas when fighters, who fled or laid low when the American troops arrived, resumed sectarian killings." Who could have guessed, I ask you?
In short, it's still true that Iraq's problems are political in nature and still true that the US military has no way of creating a non-sectarian government that people will be loyal to.
Sopranos-blogging
It was a small moment, but can I just point out that the use of the model train visual metaphor in that one scene was almost shockingly inept coming from a show that basically defined the genre of quality highbrow television.
Smearing Human Rights Groups
Perhaps the saddest thing about the "pro-Israel" political mobilization in the United States is that it's spurred a lot of demagogic and insane attacks against human rights organizations around the world. New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz, for example, lights into them for hypothetically failing to report hypothetical human rights violations in Lebanon:
But be sure that neither Human Rights Watch nor Amnesty International will be there to accuse and denounce. After all, the U.S. is not at all involved and neither are the always culpable Israelis. This is war among Arabs so no one really cares who kills whom and how. That is, no one of the professional careers.
This notion that HRW and Amnesty only criticize Israel because they exclusively criticize Israel is ridiculous. Here's an item attacking the government of Bahrain. Here's one attacking the government of Iran. Here's one attacking the government of Egypt. That's all within the past week.
And right here is the HRW item about Lebanon that Peretz says HRW would never release -- in English, in Arabic, and in French. These outfits criticize Israel when they believe Israel is committing human rights violations, just as they criticize Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, the United States, Russia, China and everyone else.
The Zero Option
Yes. What Kevin said. I think some of these residual force ideas about Iraq make a little bit of sense in a vacuum, but when you think about how things play in the real world, I think it's obvious that to secure the benefits of withdrawal from Iraq the United States needs to withdraw from Iraq in a really complete way. If there's a need to blow up some al-Qaeda installation in Anbar Province (frankly, I doubt that'll be the case, but this seems to be the main practical worry) that can be done by people who are stationed outside of Iraq and who leave Iraq really, really quickly once the blowing up is done.
Under Construction
George W. Bush: "I believe in strict constructionists. Those are the kind of judges I will appoint."
William Rehnquist: "a strict constructionist judge is one who favors criminal prosecutors over criminal defendants, and civil rights defendants over civil rights plaintiffs."
New York Times: "The Supreme Court today . . . appeared to make it easier for prosecutors to select jurors who are predisposed toward capital punishment in future cases."
And there you have it.
Downward Spiral
Ezra Klein, pimping for the cheap labor lobby, notes that not only is creating a big guest worker program seemingly popular, but "If you asked whether temporary workers should be allowed at prevailing wages, in counties with low unemployment rates (temporary workers aren't permitted in counties with unemployment at 7% or higher), and only after the job has been posted in the employer workplace, offered to any interested citizens, and posted for ten days in a wide circulation newspaper, you'd have an even heavier majority than you see now."
These are all great measures to mitigate the basic horribleness of the proposal, except that they're basically bullshit. Say unemployment is low in the county where I run my business. That means a tight labor market. That means valued employees asking for higher wages. Wages above the prevailing rate. And I need to give it to them. And that's how working people obtain prosperity in this country. Well, welcome to the United States of Guest Workerdom where if you ask for a raise, I just tell you "no" and if you quit I import a foreign worker to do your job at the old old (i.e., prevailing) rate. If my business does well, I'll expand my operation and hire more and more people, but no matter how tight the labor market gets I'll never to raise wages since I can always complain that nobody wants to do it at the prevailing rate.
Farm Blogging
Congressman Earl Blumenauer from Oregon is taking on the thankless cause of farm policy reform, both at his website and at TPM Cafe's table for one.
Putin's Popularity
Knowing her work, I'm pretty sure this isn't how she'd put it, but it seems to me that what Masha Lipman is getting at here is that Vladimir Putin has been so successful in consolidating power in Russia mostly because . . . people like him because their lives have improved a lot under his leadership.
It's easy -- and even accurate -- for us in the West to say that this is mostly just the inevitable upshot of rising oil prices and not actually anything Putin deserves credit for. Nevertheless, when you put the reality of Putin's popularity together with the fact that Russia's western-approved opposition is held in low esteem due to its complicity in robbing the country blind during the 1990s and you'll see western efforts to harangue Putin into liberalizing are unlikely to change anything or strike ordinary Russians as plausibly motivated by sincere concern for their well-being.
Photo by Flickr user Yeowatzup used under a Creative Commons license
See No Ice Shelf
New Bush global warming strategy -- reduce America's ability to measure climate change. After all, if you don't know the planet's getting warmer, then things are okay, right? It's like a tree falling in the wilderness with nobody there to hear it.
Choose Delta
Obviously has the best flight attendants in the business. Thanks to reader B.G. for the pointer.
Give Giving Peace a Chance a Chance
I'm not sure this really qualifies as muckraking per se, but over at TPM Muckraker Spencer Ackerman has a post up on how Jewish-Americans and Arab-Americans alike would like to see the United States get more involved (again) in trying to foster an Israeli-Arab settlement:
Contrary to the election-year tendency to pander to Mideast hardliners in the U.S., 68 percent of American Jews and 64 percent of American Arabs say that they'd be "more likely" to back an active peace-processor; only 3 percent of both communities would be less likely to support such a candidate. The same robust support exists in both communities for the notion that promoting a negotiated peace is in U.S. interests: 96 percent of Jewish-Americans and 91 percent of Arab-Americans answered affirmatively. And 89 percent of American Jews and 92 percent of American Arabs agree that "Arab/Jewish American collaboration" is important in making Mideast peace a reality.
Who wants to step up?
At Last
Teamsters and UNITE-HERE decided that Mark Penn's union-busting may be a problem for them.
June 5, 2007
40 Years Later
David Remnick seems insightful here on the 40th anniversary of the 6 Days War.
Leslie Southwick
I hadn't heard about this nominee: "Judge Southwick’s judicial record also shows the usual pattern of President Bush’s judicial nominees: insensitivity toward workers, consumers and people injured by corporations." Southwick did, however, find at least one case in which he chose to side with an employee rather than an employer, a case in which he "he ruled for a social worker who was rightfully fired for calling a black colleague 'a good ole nigger.'" He also "denied a bisexual mother custody of her child" and "joined a concurring opinion that went on to berate the mother for her 'decision to participate in a homosexual relationship' and reminded her that one of the consequences of her 'exertion of her perceived right' was that she might lose her child."
People wonder sometimes why compassionate conservatism hasn't done more to attract black voters over to the GOP side. More here and here (PDF).
Succession
Senator Craig Thomas of Wyoming, one of the upper house's more obscure Republicans, died last night. I agree with Robert Farley that while it would have been nice to see him replaced by a Democrat, Wyoming's rule for handling this situation seems eminently more sensible than the standard one: "Under Wyoming’s election laws, the state Republican Party will nominate three people to be his successor. The final choice will be made by the state’s governor, David Freudenthal, a Democrat."
Would it be so hard for other states to follow suit?
Peril!
In the course of a post with which I otherwise agree, Ed Kilgore remarks "Edwards' efforts to separate himself from Clinton and Obama by deriding the 'war on terror' (accurate as it is with respect to the terminology involved) is politically perilous, to say the least." This is actually what I think is the most significant aspect of Edwards' decision to take this bit of sloganeering on.
He had the balls to say what everyone knows is true (but only parenthetically) and is too afraid to say and . . . he wasn't struck down by lightning. Hillary Clinton's shameful efforts to play right-wing demagogue in response to Edwards have no sting whatsoever in my view. For years and years this kind of dogma has built-up among Bush administration critics that None May Say The Obvious about the "war on terror" lest they face dire, dire political consequences, but a party that doesn't have sufficient confidence in its national security chops to offer a really banal criticism of the Bush administration is bound to end up projecting that insecurity to voters in a way that's much more damaging than taking a 48 hour hit as the White House borrows the Clinton campaign's talking points.
Duck Ellington
I keep meaning to put this photo up. I'm not sure if this is a book or an album or both or what, but it was on sale in an ice cream shop in Manteo, North Carolina. At any rate, I couldn't quite tell you why I think this is hilarious, but I think it's pretty hilarious.
New Blog on the Block
Mark Ambinder joins the Atlantic blog team. The idea is for his blog to have (gasp!) substantial reporting with a focus on American politics. Here he is on the Democrats at the Sojourners forum yesterday.
TNR-TMBG Convergence
You know The Spine as a home of evidence-free libel ("Frankly--I have not a scintilla of evidence for this but I do have my instincts and my grasp of his corruptibility--I suspect that [Jesse] Jackson was let in on the diamond trade or some other smarmy commerce [by Charles Taylor].") but it's also a They Might Be Giants Album:
I was somehow unaware of this even though I've been to more TMBG shows than I care to admit.
When Wingnuts Fight
Here's a sweet one:
Forget about the president's charge that critics of the amnesty bill "don't want to do what's right for America" — Sen. McCain said Monday that his fellow candidates who oppose the bill "would intentionally make our country's problems worse." Intentionally. In his mind, he alone is morally fit to be president. This should be disqualification enough even for the office he currently holds, let alone the presidency.
One major upside of the current compromise not passing is that it holds out the promise that we can replay this delicious fight again in the future.
Ten Years Later
Tom Schaller alerts us to the fact that today is the tenth anniversary of the Project for a New American Century's statement of principles. All that has, naturally, worked out beautifully.
The actual statement is fairly useless propaganda. If you want a pretty decent "in their own words" statement of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, I'd go back to the slightly older Bill Kristol / Bob Kagan collaboration "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" which lays out the argument that, among other things, a foreign policy that creates a lot of dangerous crises will be politically helpful to Republicans. Charles Krauthammer's 1991 essay "The Unipolar Moment" and his 2002 followup "The Unipolar Moment Revisited" are also key texts.
30 Months
A decent chunk of hard time for Scooter Libby.
There's Something About William Jefferson...
... and that something seems to be corruption. Obviously, it would be a good thing if Democrats could get him out of the House. Mike Crowley does some noodling on ways to use his pension as a leverage point to get him to resign. And, look, if he resigns, goes to trial, gets a not guilty verdict, and then wants to run again I'll donate to his campaign.
Scandal!
Larry Flynt's offering $1 million to anyone with proof that they conducted an illicit affair with a member of congress or other high government official. My guess is that if you've got a genuinely compromising story, blackmail is probably more lucrative since these people tend to be rich (not that the government salaries are all that high, but the jobs tend to be filled by rich people) and certainly to have rich and powerful friends.
Indeed, I suspect that explicit blackmail is hardly necessary in these cases. Any idiot can see that it's important to keep one's former companions in such endeavors happy, and having a congressman consider himself to be in your debt is a solid commodity.
More Libby
According to National Review he's "a dedicated public servant caught in a crazy political fight that should have never happened, convicted of lying about a crime that the prosecutor can’t even prove was committed." But, of course, it's very hard for prosecutors to prove that crimes have been committed when the perpetrators and their employees are allowed to lie to help cover it up. This stuff is illegal for a reason.
Gee, D'Ya Think
Mickey Kaus peers into the not so tough employer sanctions in the new immigration compromise bill:
Sen. Kyl's courageous wonky negotiating toughness becomes more apparent by the hour! At some point you have to conclude that he was willingly fleeced.
At some point!
Why, I tell you it's almost as if the Republican Party's main purpose is to serve the financial interests of the corporations who finance it.
The Looming Blowout
Just how lopsided is this year's Finals going to be? Well, according to Basketball Reference, the 2006-2007 Cavaliers score 105.5 points per hundred possessions while giving up 101.3 points per hundred. That's a 4.2 point efficiency differential. The Spurs, by contrast, score 109.3 points per hundred and only give up 99.8 per hundred for a 9.5 point differential.
That's a pretty ginormous gap. The 2003 Nets had a 5.4 point efficiency differential to the '03 Spurs' 6.3, by way of contrast (a mere 0.9 point gap). Alternatively, the 2002 Lakers had a 7.2 point differential and the '02 Nets clocked in with a paltry 4.4 differential, but even that is only a 2.8 point gap.
Liveblogging Immiment
I'm gonna liveblogging this here looming GOP debate. Let me say at the outside that I'm going to be doing this under a "no meta" rule. Statements of the form "candidate x did well" mean that I, as a citizen of the Republic, was, in fact, favorably disposed to what he did; not that I, as a mighty journalist, speculate that typical people were favorably disposed to what did.
I think the business of picking "winners" and "losers" in these things is basically bullshit. Normal people don't watch these things. The reason they matter is that they impact press coverage (and, these days, blog coverage). Which is fine. But people in the press should just cover the damn thing straightforwardly in a first-order way.
Photo by Flickr user irrational cat used under a Creative Commons license
Debate
Tommy Thompson has managed to mark himself out as a huge douchebag just in the intros. Sam Brownback needs to learn what kind of ties one can wear on television.
7:04 Mike Huckabee uses his intro to be non-douchey.
7:06 Someone needs to tell Mitt Romney what "null set" means. Also someone needs to tell him that inspectors were in Iraq.
(he did the null set thing twice!)
7:09 Rudy Giuliani rightly says Iraq needs to be viewed in a broader context, and then goes on to place it in the broader context that he's out of his freaking mind and believes Saddam Hussein, the government of Iran, and al-Qaeda are all in league against the United States.
NOTE Tom Ricks reports in Fiasco that only a half a dozen members of congress actually read the classified NIE. Dick Durbin and Bob Graham have both indicated that the classified NIE was at odds with the administration's public claims.
7:13 For a straight-talker, John McCain sure is desperately eager to avoid the question of what to do "if" (i.e., when) the surge doesn't "work."
7:16 I have no idea what point Mike Huckabee is trying to make about the Taliban's belief that they, rather than Ronald Reagan, won the Cold War but it's an interesting observation and -- unusual for a participant in this debate -- it's even true.
7:20 Someone needs to tell Rudy Giuliani that the Cold War was over during the 1990s.
Mmm...pizza.
7:25 I can't believe Rudy is trying to get away with evading the fact that as mayor of New York City he actually sued to defend his right to not enforce immigration laws.
7:29 McCain is fairly persuasive on immigration.
7:32 I like Duncan Hunter's conspiratorial account of the Bush administration's fence-related activities. But if he thinks Bush is so devious, then shouldn't this have broader implications for his view of the incumbent.
7:40 These Fred Thompson answers are super-annoying.
Also -- what does it mean that so far Wolf Blitzer has the line of the night (about lightning striking Giuliani). Also -- since when is religion important to Giuliani? Does he go to church? Was his third marriage in a church?
7:44 Obviously, I'm not a Young Earth Creationist the way Huckabee is, but he had a great answer to the annoying evolution question. Brownback's answer is good, too! We need more creationists in politics.
7:50 "Energy independence" is a wrongheaded notion (imported Canadian hydropower?) when Democrats espouse it, and it doesn't get less wrongheaded when Giuliani talks about it.
8:00 Mitt Romney's flip-flop on gays in the military is really egregious. Meanwhile, the idea that you can't change these kind of things in the middle of a war seems odd. Wasn't racial integration done during the Korean War? Is Charlie Rangel around somewhere to talk about this?
8:04 Tancredo attacks Bush! You'd think this guy could pull like 6-7 percent in the polls.
HALFTIME!
I say -- liveblogging sucks, and I'm not going to do it anymore.
LeBron Versus Kobe
Chris Broussard at ESPN.com:
Though LeBron will never score 81 points in a game, he is essentially just as good of a scorer as Kobe is. He's much more efficient because he shoots a higher field-goal percentage and scores in the flow of the offense. And he doesn't dominate the ball as much as Kobe and D-Wade.
But he's, um, not a more efficient scorer. He does shoot a higher percentage (.471 versus .463) but Kobe's a better free throw shooter and hits more treys, so Kobe's TS% is better (58 versus 55.2) and his turnover rate is slightly better (9.4 versus 9.2). LeBron's advantages are better rebounding, and a superior assist rate.
Stay Classy, Politico
"Jessica Valenti, who runs and blogs on feministing.com, is standing at an angle with a slight arch in her back, making the focal point of the photo, whether intentional or not, her breasts." This is a family blog, but what she said.
Debate Wrap-Up
To me, a shockingly large and diverse group of B List Republicans -- Huckabee, Brownback, Tancredo, and even in their ways Paul and Thompson -- are more impressive than the official "big three." They all seemed to me to come much closer than Giuliani, McCain, or Romney to be coming at things from a principle, coherent point of view. The top contenders are all "Reagan! Terror! Bush! Terror! Reagan! Terreagan!" and weirdly busy running away from their actual records.
June 6, 2007
Do We Think This Will Work?
I guess Catherine thought that posting "holler if you are interested in running 3-4 miles with a kinda outtashape but still reasonably fast running partner in DC" was likely to attract a lot of stalkers, so instead she went with:
i should also note that i'm again looking for a running partner on monday AM (7 am-ish, yes this is optimistic, but still) and saturdays at any point, so holler if you are interested in running 3-4 miles with a kinda outtashape but still reasonably fast running partner in DC. and if you're not a psycho stalker.
My feeling is that what differentiates the "psycho" stalkers from the polite, friendly ones is that they're precisely the ones least likely to be dissuaded by a "no psycho stalkers" disclaimer.
Fairy Tales
In my debate liveblog, I expressed some admiration for Mike Huckabee's answer to Wolf Blitzer's question about why he doesn't believe in evolution. I see that Jamie Kirchick didn't care for the reply at all: "Sorry, but if someone believes in fairy tales, I think that's pretty relevant to their qualifications as president." But why? The core of Huckabee's answer is here:
It’s interesting that that question would even be asked of somebody running for president. I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book. I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States.
That's quite right. Blitzer is just being a pain in the ass. It would be a serious problem if Huckabee were proposing to meddle in eighth-grade science textbooks, but he rightly understands that in the American system this isn't a federal question. On the fairy tales part, well, I'm unimpressed. My understanding is that Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama all believe that Jesus Christ died for the sins of mankind and then rose from the dead. This strikes me as a hell of a tall tale. But, obviously, it's not what you'd call a rare view in the United States and if we're going to start writing off politicians who believe in "fairy tales" of this sort there's going to be nobody left.
To me, the only truly grating remark about religion in the GOP debate was Rudy Giuliani trying to pretend that his faith is important to him. Giuliani's like the reverse of someone who takes his Catholicism seriously -- the divorces, the affairs, the gay rights, the abortion, the preventive war, the total absence of any Christian Democratic spirit of generosity -- and everyone knows it.
Super Double Corrupt
When the quid pro quo in your corrupt dealings is so obvious that reporters feel compelled to remark that "Rarely, though, are the tradeoffs quite as obvious as in the twisted case of Coconut Road" you know you have a problem. A little discretion never killed anyone, though I suppose it remains to be seen if Representative Don Young's (R-Alaska) lack of it will kill his career.
Pretty hilariously, even though he got the cash appropriated to build this road in Florida "County authorities have twice voted not to use it, until Mr. Young and the district congressman wrote letters warning that a refusal could jeopardize future federal money for the county." It seems, however, that the money is a boon "to Daniel J. Aronoff, a real estate developer who helped raise $40,000 for Mr. Young at the nearby Hyatt Coconut Point hotel days before he introduced the measure."
Fake Right, Veer Left
Ezra Klein's getting happier with the Obama health care plan.
The Challenge
To me, the takeaway message of watching the Republicans debate is that Democrats need to realize that in 2008 they'll be matching up against a campaign of audacious -- almost awe-inspiringly so -- lies, and they need to be prepared to aggressively swat them down. For example, Rudy Giuliani said:
It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror. And the problem is that we see Iraq in a vacuum. Iraq should not be seen in a vacuum. Iraq is part of the overall terrorist war against the United States.
Now you might think this would count as a giant gaffe -- something much worse than Gerald Ford misspeaking about Soviet domination of Poland. It indicates that Giuliani is either totally ignorant about Iraq and al-Qaeda or else breathtakingly dishonest on the subject. My colleague Jim Fallows has that take -- "Huh???" he responds in a post entitled "What Is Rudy Giuliani Talking About???" Unfortunately for Democrats, the way political reporters in practice cover this stuff is much better exemplified by my other colleague Marc Ambinder who merely notes that "Giuliani linked Iraq to the broader war on terror and kept accusing Democrats of burying their heads in the sand."
I don't like it, but that's the way the game is played. What I'd really like to see, though, is the politician with enough confidence in his or her own command of the national security issue to just shoot back as if we live in a sane universe wherein BS like that from Giuliani demonstrates not "toughness" but his unfitness to lead the country.
Men are From Mars, Women Are From Sweden
Tyler Cowen discusses the contributions of feminist economics:
Gender differences in analyzing the effects of policy. Sweden, no matter what you think of it in absolute terms, is a better deal for women than for men. Overall women are more risk-averse and less interested in accumulating large sums of wealth. The Soviet Union was less bad for women than for men. Many governmental health care systems are better geared toward the needs of women (e.g., easy access to pre-natal care) than for men, who require massive medical innovation to fix their heart attacks. And so on. These points don't receive enough attention.
I think this always gets less attention than it should when people set about to talk about voting behavior. The "gender gap" in US politics tends to be treated as either driven by stylistic attribubes (Republicans nominate manly men) or else by "women's issues" construed in a very narrow way (abortion, sex discrimination law). It's worth noting that this sort of gender gap -- women vote further left than men -- seems to be pretty universal across advanced democracies and appears to me to be tied to very broad issues. I doubt anyone thinks of this explicitly "as a woman, I both face more objective exposure to risk and a higher level of risk aversion, therefore, I'll back the Democrats" but I think it's almost certainly an important driver of voting behavior anyway.
We're In Ur Dorms Downloadin Ur Filez
Oh, Lord, I hadn't realized that big media's hired goons in congress are now busy persecuting college administrators for being insufficiently zealous in their persecution of college students who download stuff.
The whole thing's preposterous. The social value of halting noncommercial copyright infringement by a class of people who overwhelmingly don't have any money is probably negative in the first place, to say nothing of the costs involved in implementing draconian countermeasures.
Ah, Hockey
I read this in the DC Express this morning, so it may even be true: "The Stanley Cup has brought record low ratings to NBC for prime-time programming. Game 3's 1.1 national rating matched a rerun of The West Wing in July 2005."
Photo by Flickr user Mafue used under a Creative Commons license.
Saudi Arabia
Megan Stack's recounting of her life in Saudi Arabia is a reminder that for all the ink that's been wasted on bringing liberalism to the Muslim world by bombing Muslim country or yelling really loudly at Iran, there are much more obvious things that could be done:
The rules are different here. The same U.S. government that heightened public outrage against the Taliban by decrying the mistreatment of Afghan women prizes the oil-slicked Saudi friendship and even offers wan praise for Saudi elections in which women are banned from voting. All U.S. fast-food franchises operating here, not just Starbucks, make women stand in separate lines. U.S.-owned hotels don't let women check in without a letter from a company vouching for her ability to pay; women checking into hotels alone have long been regarded as prostitutes.
People could organize a boycott in the US and Europe against Western fast food franchises that enforce this kind of gender apartheid abroad. The Saudi market's not that big, in the scheme of things, it would be relatively easy to put companies in a position where it's not financially worth it for them to keep operating Saudi franchises under those conditions. Maybe the Saudi regime would let them operate differently. Maybe they'd agree to pay the price of isolation and activists would need to move on to the next economic sector. It does, however, seem to me that the Saudi elite prizes maintaining some degree of integration with the cultural and commercial mainstream and wouldn't want to see Western brands all withdraw from their country.
The Irony
A sage correspondent notes that the WSJ's coverage of letters in support of Scooter Libby includes this:
Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, described himself as "the kind of liberal whom many neoconservatives like to despise." In an interview, he said Mr. Libby had been a friend ever since he handled a legal problem for the editor in the 1980s. "He was amazingly kind and diligent" then, Mr. Wieseltier said. He added that he didn't realize the letter had been made public.
Because of neoconservatives' well-known dislike of the sort of extremely hawkish liberals whose primary political interest is foreign policy and pro-Israel activism and who write letters urging leniency for neoconservative criminals?
More Gay Sex Needed
I think it's too bad that this deleted scene ("not safe for work," as the kids say, though, really, if your boss lets you waste time on YouTube he may as well let you waste time watching YouTube videos that include profane language) from Knocked Up eventually goes in the direction of suggesting that one could only feel that Brokeback Mountain didn't have enough hot gay sex because the person making the criticism is secretly gay.
I outlined this very same critique back in March 2006 and I stand by both it and my heterosexual status.
Null Set Blogging
Sure, Mitt Romney is crazy wrong about Iraq, but that's normal for a Republican. I'm more interested in his weird use of the term "null set." While researching that topic, I learned something interesting. It turns out that the thing I was taught to call either "null set" or "empty set" is now supposed to be the empty set exclusively.
The purpose of this is to avoid confusion with a different concept, also called that comes to us from measure theory:
In measure theory, a null set is a set that is negligible for the purposes of the measure in question. Which sets are null will depend on the measure considered. Thus one may speak of "m-null sets" for a given measure m.
In neither sense, however, does what Mitt Romney said make sense.
The Third Way
Thomas Friedman writes about the Israel-Palestine conflict: "The third way, unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza, has been discredited by Hezbollah’s attack from Lebanon and the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza." This is, factually speaking, true. Unilateralism was very popular in Israel and among pro-Israel activists in the diaspora and then rapidly became unpopular when Hamas and Hezbollah continued to fire rockets across the unilaterally established borders.
What I've always wondered about this was why this process happened in public opinion? I had thought that the point of unilateralism was that Israelis reached the conclusion (rightly or wrongly) that there was nothing they could agree to that would stop the occasional terrorist attack so that Israel might as well unilaterally withdraw to borders that were practically and morally easier to defend. Agree with that or not, it seems logical enough and it's not a proposition whose logic is undermined by the fact that some rocket attacks happened.
It seems, though, that what made unilateralism popular was that a large number of people thought that if the Palestinians were unilaterally given substantially less than they'd rejected at Camp David that they would spontaneously -- decide to take that new, less favorable non-negotiated offer with such a degree of unanimity that no cross-border rocket attacks owuld ever happen. And, well, of course that theory got discredit -- it was always really dumb.
Durant at the Bench Press
I think you'd have to be a little crazy to let the fact that Kevin Durant flubbed the bench press at the NBA Draft Combine very seriously. I doubt the Titans are regretting taking Vince Young at number three despite his poor wonderlic score. This combine info is probably useful to have when you're looking at the lesser prospects -- you figure that when it comes to labeling one guy the 13th best prospect in the draft and another guy the 14th best the scouts are 97 percent full of shit so you may as well assemble some quantitative info about how strong they are -- but seems useless with top guys.
All-in-all, I feel like the sports media has been depressed by how clearcut the number one and number two picks are this year and have been trying to gin up first silly reasons why Durant might go higher than Oden and now why Durant's stock might slip.
Photo by Wikipedian Corpx, used under a Creative Commons license.
Interracial Dating Versus Heliocentrism
When I posted on Americans' increasing tolerance of interracial dating a lot of people were less happy to see that 83 percent think it's okay than baffled by the continued presence of the other 17 percent. It's a fair enough point, but Kieran Healy points out that only about 75 percent of the population agrees that the earth orbits the sun, while 18.3 percent think it's the other way 'round.
Thompson and Griffin
Fred Thompson's un-campaign has signed up Tim Griffin as a consultant of some sort. Griffin, you may recall, did a brief stint as US Attorney for Arkansas as part of a secondary plotline in the purge affair.
Also: Ignorance Now Equals Strength
Tony Snow thinks the United States is reducing carbon emissions.
June 7, 2007
Getting Worse
Conservative whining is getting results, as Senate amendments to the already somewhat distasteful immigration compromise bill are making it worse, including senseless provisions that "blocked the bill's newly legalized illegal immigrants from receiving the earned-income tax credit" plus Hillary-approved language "that would at once declare English the national language and designate English the 'common language' of the United States" just as, you know, a kind of pointless "fuck you" to people who speak other tongues.
Ezra was indicating to me yesterday that we're likely to see the reverse process in the House -- passage of a bill that's better than the initial compromise (likely including provision for guest workers to petition for citizenship which would, I think, be a huge improvement). Then there's going to be a conference committee clash to determine what (if anything) actually results from this.
Photo by Flickr user Victoria Peckham used under a Creative Commons license.
The Purge
Joe Lieberman gets a primary challenge from the left, with his challenger representing the overwhelming majority view of the war in Iraq, and it's purge time. Chuck Hagel gets a challenge from the right, with his challenger representing a fringe position on Iraq that's also somehow become GOP orthodoxy and the press says . . . diddly squat would be my guess.
Big Media Ezra
Young Klein on Hardball:
Null Set Blogging, Part 2
Oh, lordy. Mark Kleiman catches the Note making Mitt Romney out to be some kind of super-nerd who's possibly too smart for the presidency thanks to his deployment of the term "null set." Apparently, it hasn't dawned on them that Romney was misusing the term.
Russia and the Missile Shield
I've been trying to puzzle through what to say about the Bush-Putin contretemps over US deployment of missile defense systems in central Europe. On the one hand, yes, the Russians are being weird about this. The US obviously isn't planning a nuclear first strike on Russian targets, and the shield wouldn't help us accomplish that either. That said, the baffled and indignant tone of yesterday's Washington Post editorial was silly, particularly in its insistence on treating Russian objections to the US security posture as simply of a piece with Vladimir Putin's authoritarian tendencies.
Peretz Versus Walt
New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz: "Stephen M. Walt, professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard University, had had a lackluster career until he (and John Mearsheimer) happened on the Jews." Lackluster, really?
He got a BA from Stanford, then an MA and a PhD from Berkeley. He taught at Princeton and the University of Chicago before coming to Harvard. His book on The Origins of Alliances won the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He's the author of two other books -- Revolution and War and Taming American Power. He's on the editorial board of Security Studies, Foreign Policy, and International Relations and he's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. All this before he ever wrote "The Israel Lobby." It's a pretty successful career. Certainly, I think it stands up well to using your wife's money to buy a prestigious magazine and then wreck its finances and reputation, but maybe that's just me.
The crazy thing about recent Spine-blogging, from my point of view, is that the guy doesn't even own the magazine anymore.
Bonus Peretz Blogging
Proclaims that it's "hard to believe" that Valerie and Joe Wilson "lived an undercover life" since, I guess, magazine editors are better-positioned than the CIA to know who is and is not a covert CIA asset. Also suggests that Scooter Libby should be allowed to get away with breaking the law because he believes Alberto Gonzalez was too soft on Sandy Berger.
Kerr to Phoenix
Steve Kerr is taking over as general manager of the Phoenix Suns, leaving Mike D'Antoni as a mere coach. This doesn't strike me as a great job to take. Most accounts have it that the priority for the Phoenix ownership is to shed salary, rather than improve the team. It seems like a set-up to become the villain in a column written three years from now.
Null Set Blogging, Part Three
Brian Beutler uncovers a May 8 transcript which reveals that the debate this week isn't the first time Mitt Romney offered his curious answer to the question "If you had to make the decision, based on what we know now, if you were the president there, do you think you would have done the same thing?"
Well, it's a setting that's almost a null set. Which is, if we knew that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and if he had complied with the United Nations resolutions to allow IAEA inspectors into his country, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Almost a null set, eh? Brian also notes that this is "evidence that he didn't just screw up his Iraq history at the debates on Tuesday, but rather that he's in a constant state of either denial, ignorance, or deception."
On March 7, 2003 Muhammed ElBarradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency told the world, "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq."
Farley on the US and Russia
Robert Farley has a longish article up on The American Prospect website that does a brilliant job of explicating the current conflict in broader context and offering recommendations.
The Sun'll Go Down In Five Years
Aha! Crucial immigration developments missing from my morning paper. Ezra Klein says:
But last night, after the papers went to bed, the good guys won one too: Byron Dorgan's amendment to sunset the guest worker program after five years, which had earlier gone down on a 48-49 vote, passed, on a 49-48 vote. The flips, which mainly came on the right, were weird: Jim Bunning went from no to yes, Tom Coburn went from yes to no, Jim DeMint went from no to yes, Chris Dodd went from abstention to support, Elizabeth Dole went from no to yes, Mike Enzi went from no to yes, etc. This is rather important, as one of the question with the bill is whether a better -- or possibly shorter -- guest worker program crafted in conference with the House can survive the final vote. This is evidence that, particularly on the Republican side, it can.
Sounds good to me.
Favourite Worst Nightmare
The media hype that proceeded the Arctic Monkeys' first record was one of the most annoying things ever, and rendered all the more annoying by the fact that I liked-but-didn't-love the album. About the second album, however, I heard no hype whatsoever before listening to it for the first time today, and on one listen I like it, but don't love it, except this time in a completely non-annoying way.
The Wine Menace
The UK government is preparing to "broaden" the focus of its campaign against "excessive drinking" with the "focus moving beyond teenagers and the binge-drinkers to include those regularly sipping wine at home." My friend Jeff, wine-lover and die-hard paternalist, wrestles with a dilemma.
Killer of Sheep
I'm going to see this apparently legendary film tonight. I don't, however, really understand this:
Over the years, "Killer of Sheep" has been shown here and there in museums and at festivals, from a tattered 16-millimeter print. With a soundtrack dominated by classics from George Gershwin, Paul Robeson, Etta James and Dinah Washington, the music rights have made a wide release prohibitively expensive. Until now. Through the good offices of archivists at UCLA and the cinematic saints at Milestone Films, "Killer of Sheep" can now finally be seen -- and heard -- in all its glory.
That's some old music. I have a hard time seeing how the rights holders wouldn't be better off waving the fee, letting the movie go into wide release, and then selling a soundtrack album. I mean, how many Paul Robeson CDs sell in any given year? Certainly it seems like an odd reason for a celebrated film to be so hard to see.
Klein Versus Armey
If Time's whole "let's give crazy right-wing ex-politicians a spot on our political blog" experiment results in more of this sweet Joe Klein smackdown stuff in response, then I say it's all for the best. On some level, it's worth exposing the fact that Armey actually is every bit as intellectually shallow as he seems to be during brief television appearances. Anyone can look dumb on cable, but on a blog you have the opportunity to explain yourself at any length you like and Armey just . . . can't.
Edwards on Terrorism
There's a lot of promising notions here, though the meaty proposals are outlined with a fairly broad brush. I'll probably have more to say soon when I get a more in-depth understanding of what some of this is meant to mean. My favorite part, though, is really just the opening line: "There is no question that America is less safe today because of the president's 'War on Terror Doctrine.'"
Obviously, that's not a strategy, but by simultaneously rejecting the "war on terror" conceptual framework and the notion that Bush's policies have been successful, Edwards is signaling that he's open to running a foreign policy that's different from Bush's in broad, strategic terms. Hillary Clinton, by breaking the other way on both of those questions in the most recent debate, did the reverse. Edwards has still left it pretty unclear what that alternative vision will look like, but he's taken significant steps in the right direction.
UPDATE: Okay, I'd say my main doubt here is that the "Marshall Corps" Edwards is envisioning may not really be doable. Carlos Pascual tried to create a more modest (about 3,000) version of this kind of thing but it's not going so well. Edwards seem to place much more emphasis on this idea, though, so the odds of pulling it off increase.
Edwards approach to the force size / force structure question is really admirable. There's a dual temptation here to either take the "tough" path and call for a bigger Army or else play to the base by loudly denouncing those who are calling for one. Edwards is doing the sound thing and laying out some reasonable principles that should govern thinking about these issues and not prejudging exactly what number that will leave you with down the road.
Licensing
One Ted T. has the answer to why my proposed solution to Killer of Sheep's IP problems won't fly:
The reason is that licensing is the purview of "music publishing" companies, who are usually entirely unrelated to the record companies. Thus if artist X were to sell a ton of CDs, because their song was heard in a popular film, the "music publishers" won't see a dime -- their profit comes only from the licensing fees.
Of course this is insanely stupid for the music industry as a whole -- they would be much better off to wave licensing fees entirely and sell more records. Then they wouldn't have to bribe radio stations to play their music... If the powers that be had any sense at all -- they would buy out and put out of business the music publishers, and set up a low cost, simple licensing procedure. It would still be expensive to license a band like The Beatles who don't need the advertising, and don't want people becoming sick of their music, but the rights for low selling artists, who could use the promotion, would be available for a song.
But this won't happen, because the music industry is tenaciously clinging to a nearly century old business model, and will continue to do so until most new artist start self publishing, and put the entire industry out of business for good.
And there you have it.
We Win, They Lose
See, the Victory Caucus concept had always struck me as possibly the dumbest thing ever, but it's totally blown away by We Win, They Lose. I mean, just take the basic reference:
When it came to defeating the Soviets, Ronald Reagan made it simple: "We win, they lose." Now more than ever, the defeatists in Congress must hear that same message. America will never surrender.
I mean, which "they" are we trying to beat in Iraq? What would winning look like? If Nouri al-Maliki succeeds in consolidating control over Iraq more firmly, leaving a coalition of Iranian-backed Shiite parties firmly in charge, does that mean "we" win? What would we have won?
That Pill Is Poison
I'd been taking Ezra's word for it that the Dorgan Amendment sunsetting the proposed guest worker program wasn't a poison pill. Fawn Johnson in CongressDaily PM, however, seems to have the goods:
"I'm at the point that I don't think we can get enough agreement to fix the bill, so my preference is to stop it and start over. So if it hurts the deal, I'm for it," said DeMint. Asked if he was trying to kill the bill with his vote on the Dorgan amendment, Bunning said, "I've been trying to kill it for a long time."
That said, Johnson also reports that negotiators are still claiming they'll be able to pass a bill. She also says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney "said he could not support the immigration package even with the Dorgan amendment."
Penn Again
My colleague Marc Ambinder has the story of Hillary Clinton's campaigning pretending to bow to Mark Penn-related pressure, as Penn agrees to "recuse himself" from his company's union-busting work. Penn also insists that he never did any of the union-busting work personally. So, in short, Penn and Clinton are promising that in response to labor's complaints they're going to . . . keep doing all the same things. He'll still be profiting from his firm's union-busting work. Ari Berman has more:
"The logic of the question has considerable merit," says Harold Ickes, a longtime Clinton advisor and ambassador to organized labor. "Mark has told us that he is taking extra steps to assure people on the outside that he does not engage with clients that may be involved in controversial issues. The phrase 'Chinese wall' has been used."Ickes predicts rival campaigns will use the anti-labor connection against Clinton. "You don't want to have attention deflected from the candidate," he says. [...]
Penn's "recusal" must thus be seen as a classic case of PR spin; a phony gesture that fails to address the underlying problems or the reasons prominent labor leaders are upset with Clinton's campaign.
Now I assume that if the unions keep up the heat, they'll eventually get Clinton and Penn to go further on this front. That said, I think it says something that she found herself in this position in the first place. A Clinton administration, like the Clinton campaign, would doubtless be pro-union in a whole variety of ways. Clearly, though, she doesn't really have her heart in it. She also clearly seems to value her relationship with Mark Penn (who's really a problematic figure for all sorts of broader reasons) over her relationship with one of the central pillars of the progressive coalition.
Lets Play Commissar
Caitlin Flanagan's article about cyber-stalking in the new Atlantic contains this description of Club Penguin, a social networking opportunity I'd never heard of:
What fun they had! Club Penguin is a cute, happy virtual world in which you create an adorable little penguin in whose guise you can travel to all sorts of fun spots and play video games (making pizzas against the clock, playing ice hockey, going inner-tubing), for which you win coins. With the coins you can buy clothes and furniture and cool stuff for your virtual igloo. The boys loved it. Everyone loved it. Club Penguin was the most happening event of the second grade; to be denied it was to be denied not just a pleasure but an essential mode of schoolyard discussion and inclusion, a way of being a second-grader.But I never let them play again, be-cause something about it scared me: The penguins could chat with each other. True, the chatting is monitored by paid professionals and a citizens’ army of tattlers, children who’ve been members for more than 30 days and who’ve been commissioned as “Secret Agents” to loiter in the public spaces and report on inappropriate chat, including the exchange of telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. But these protocols only highlight the paradox at Club Penguin’s core: It’s certainly the safest way for unsupervised children to talk to potentially malevolent strangers—but why would you want them to do that in the first place?
Maybe this is the difference between being a parent and being a callow youth, but to me the salient point here is that I'm not sure I'm thrilled with the idea that today's youth are hanging out in a cutesy, virtual East Germany. Who wants their kids playing a game where they get commissioned as "Secret Agents" charged with informing on their fellow avatars to the authorities? It's creepy and weird.
Killer of Sheep
Okay, now I've seen it. It's great just like they say. If it's playing near you, you should go. Really extraordinary. Plus, it's short enough that catching the 7:30 show was totally compatible with watching the Spurs-Cavs game. My friends and I spent most of the fourth quarter rooting for San Antonio to hold Cleveland under 70 (rooting on the outcome of the game was a moot point), but the Spurs lost intensity there and wound up giving up 76.
June 8, 2007
Night of the Living Immigration Reform
Comprehensive immigration reform looks to be dead. I don't buy the theory that this was liberals' best chance for a sensible bill. The polling -- unless you adopt the Mickey Kaus method of relying exclusively on Rasmussen -- doesn't support the notion that there's overwhelming public opposition to reform.
The objective social conditions militating in favor of reform -- namely, a status quo that nobody's happy with, and that everyone is increasingly less happy with every year -- aren't going to vanish. Meanwhile the odds favor political circumstances growing more favorable to reform, both in terms of more Democrats in congress (and the White House), but also in terms of remaining Republicans growing skeptical that fealty to the base is the best path back to power.
Licensing Again
Okay, reliable sources are indicating to me that this take on music licensing is all wrong. In fact, "the bulk of music publishers' money comes from 'mechanical royalties,' which are essentially standardized licensing fees (set by a federal administrative court) that the publisher receives every time a writer's song is sold in some form. Which is to say: When your commenter says publishers 'won't see a dime' if a writer's song sells a ton of copies, he's got it precisely backwards. That's where a huge chunk of their money comes from."